Announcing Templates release 1.4 (Golden Gate)

Team Dolphin templateers Elliot Spencer, Michael Hungbo, and Sakura Ticer made several updates and reworked our API getting started template. Elliot, Michael, and Sakura worked incredibly hard on this project, which involved incorporating feedback from several internal reviews. As a result, they created an excellent template that will help writers and developers create effective API documentation. In the process of reworking that template, they renamed the API quickstart template to the API getting started template to better reflect what this content type is commonly called.

API getting started guides provide users with a streamlined path to get started with an API without having to read through lengthy documentation to understand key steps. Having an API Getting Started guide results in faster user integration, reducing the learning curve for your users and providing them with practical examples.

To create your own high-quality guide, check out our API Getting Started template in our templates GitLab repository!

Team Dolphin templates lead Alyssa Rock and Team Alpaca templateer Christine Belize made great improvements to our README template. They did excellent work and focused on adding the process and resource files to this template. The process file provides in-depth information on how to plan and research your project’s README, how to author your README file, and how to maintain a README file for your project. The README resource guide provides high-quality examples of READMEs in action and additional resources that assisted in the creation of our template.

To create your own high-quality README, check out our README template in our templates GitLab repository!

During the Golden Gate release, our community continued to grow. In addition to being a co-lead for the UX working group, Valeria Hernandez became a project co-chair, which means The Good Docs Project now has project co-chairs in every major region: AMER, APAC, and EMEA. We also welcomed tech team member Melissa Mergner to the Project Steering Committee!

The Team Alpaca (Templates and Chronologue - AMER/APAC) working group now has two new co-leads: Cat Keller and Deidre French. They did an excellent job co-leading during the Golden Gate release, which was their first full release cycle. We also want to thank Deanna Thompson and Ailine Dominey for their many years of service as Alpaca co-leads.

The DocOps Registry has a new lead, Rick Larsen. Rick has helped to reinvigorate that group, which is now meeting regularly and accomplishing important work.

We want to thank Elliot Spencer for his year of service as co-lead for the Team Dolphin (Chronologue) working group. We also want to thank Marat Yapparov for his service as co-lead for the Knowledge Base working group. We will miss you both!

In May, community members Alyssa Rock, Rick Larsen, and Carrie Wattula attended the Write the Docs Portland conference. This conference brought together 415 in-person attendees and 170 virtual attendees for three days of knowledge sharing and community building. The unconference sessions sparked lively discussions about docs-as-code practices and tips for new and experienced technical writers.

Among the many compelling presentations at Write the Docs, Stephanie Fuller’s Writing the Shipwreck stood out as a masterclass in managing sprawling documentation repositories. Stephanie’s nautical metaphor resonated strongly as she shared practical strategies for navigating and restructuring large-scale documentation projects. We want to thank Stephanie for giving The Good Docs Project a shout-out during her talk. We were excited to learn that Stephanie borrowed some of her ideas from us and recommends our templates!

In addition to the new templates in this release, the template editorial team spent this release cycle developing our template quality checklists. Their main goal was to define the acceptance criteria for each of the template deliverables. They wanted to create a quality rubric that would ensure template editorial team members can provide standardized review criteria when assessing template quality. They also hoped to provide clearer guidance to our community members about expectations for their projects.

To accomplish this task, they held a 10-week workshop where they discussed many different aspects of template quality and brainstormed which dimensions of quality would best meet the project’s needs. Each editorial team member helped create portions of the quality checklist, and then they brought them together to ensure they were streamlined and normalized. We’re very pleased with the final results and look forward to sharing them with the broader community later.

As a nice side benefit from this project, they also identified potential usability problems in our current templates that they want to address in future release cycles. The editorial team hopes to generate a robust backlog of easy issues for first-time contributors to work on to help our project improve the quality of existing templates in our repository.

As part of our project’s commitment to maintaining a respectful and inclusive community, the community managers recently completed a Code of Conduct review process. This resulted in a formal correction plan related to a contributor’s behavior that impacted team collaboration. We remain focused on ensuring that The Good Docs Project continues to be a safe, collaborative space for all participants, and we deeply appreciate the community’s trust and support during this process.

In lighter news, the community managers also worked to help break down silos between working groups by introducing some new social channels on Discord. Now community members can talk and share about common interests such as food, music, books, movies, travel, and pets. They can also share any wins that happened recently. So far, these channels have generated fun discussions and many cute or beautiful photos.

Lastly, the community managers explored potential solutions to improve cross-coordination across the project. Their goal was to propose a way to foster greater social trust through shared expectations and increased predictability, reduce project inefficiencies, and prevent member burnout through better resource allocation. They released their proposal to the community for feedback and they hope to fully implement it in the next cycle, pending an upcoming vote from the Project Steering Committee.

The UX team is working on a project-critical mission to better understand our user base and assess the overall usability of our template projects. They have interviewed 10 different professionals working in development and technical writing to learn more about their needs and friction points when using templates.

They plan to continue conducting interviews in the next release cycle with the goal of summarizing their research findings and presenting a list of suggestions and recommendations to the Project Steering Committee when the research project concludes.

The Outreach team is proud to share The Good Docs Project’s blog series on the value of documentation and its impact on business goals. A huge thank you to the authors, Ravi Murugesan and Lana Novikova from Team Macaw, for their dedication and insightful contributions to the series. We also want to thank the Outreach team for their edits, feedback, and publication of each post.

If you’ve ever wondered how you can elevate the role of documentation within your organization and create a business case for your docs, this series is a must-read. Check out Parts 1-7 of the Making a Business Case for Documentation series on The Good Docs Project’s blog now.

The Tech team has continued to support the project across a range of platforms and services, and continues to improve workflows and facilitate member contribution, communication, and collaboration.

As the Tech team handles ongoing maintenance and management of our website, GitLab repositories, Google services, Discord server, automations, and more, we want to thank all members for their hard work this release cycle.

With the UX and Outreach teams running UX interviews this cycle, it’s been important for those who signed up to be able to receive authentic communication from the project. The Tech team has facilitated communication with 40+ UX interview attendees and created meeting rooms for each interview.

The Welcome Wagon meetings have always required significant logistical work completed by the primary organizer (Alyssa Rock). Thank you, Alyssa! The Tech team has worked together this cycle to develop automation processes to replace the existing manual triage of Welcome Wagon meeting sign-ups. This automation is undergoing testing and will be deployed at the start of The Good Docs Project’s Helix release.

If you are interested in learning more about The Good Docs Project, we invite you to a Welcome Wagon meeting.

A contact form is being developed for our website to provide a way to reach the team outside of Welcome Wagon meeting sign-ups. Automations for the form will ensure users can directly contact The Good Docs Project’s key members. This will provide a communication pathway for new partnerships, outreach requests, and general inquiries. The form is undergoing testing and will be deployed as part of the upcoming Helix release.

There have been significant changes in our Chronologue project this release, from project management to new examples. We’re very excited about these developments, as they lay a strong foundation for new examples currently in development.

Many thanks to Andrea Wright, Elliot Spencer, Michael Hungbo, and Michael Park for their work running the Chronologue working groups this cycle.

This cycle has seen significant new developments in the world of the Chronologue. Previously, developing a consistent picture of the Chronologue world had hampered the development of examples. New work around basic use cases, developing our understanding of the entities within the Chronologue world, and proposing a new core API for OCTAVIA’s Chronologue have all contributed to a much more mature view of the Chronologue project as a whole. This provides a platform for many more examples to be developed.

With the changes to the Chronologue canon and additional thought put into our overall contribution process, new Chronologue repositories have been deployed that separate project management from documentation.

A new Chronologue Project repository has been deployed with our community health and meta documentation to help contributors, where issues will be tracked and managed. Additionally, a new Chronologue documentation repository has been deployed to replace the old Chronologue websites.

Existing repositories have been archived, including the repository containing the previous website, and the mock tool. These will be retired, as the old website and the mock tool no longer represents our new collective understanding of the Chronologue and the canon.

The new Chronologue website has been deployed and showcases the best of our existing templates, and some new content.

This replaces our old Chronologue documentation site with a focused, Sphinx based deployment. With an easier contribution model, this site better reflects common tooling for open-source documentation projects.

An example of the concept template has been developed and merged into the new website. This example details the coordinate system of OCTAVIA’s Chronologue, and provides a data structure for the Chronologue API.

With this hard science approach to a foundational aspect of the Chronologue, this provides a theoretical basis for the operation of the Chronologue, and will tie into many examples for the Chronologue moving forward.

Using the new concept example, a new API has been proposed by Team Alpaca Chronologue members (Michael Park and Yerin Chang) to facilitate development of consistent, high quality API documentation moving forward. This embraces the new understanding of the Chronologue canon, and will provide a theoretical API for contributors to use in documentation examples rather than creating the API as they write their examples.

With this new development, the old API reference document has been flagged for deprecation, and the old API overview has been retired.