Announcing Templates release 1.5 (Helix)

We’re delighted to announce that Michael Addison, from Team Alpaca (Templates AMER/APAC), has completed his comprehensive rework of the general-purpose reference template for the Helix release. Michael has been thoughtfully iterating on this template for quite some time, refining its structure, improving clarity, and aligning the format with modern documentation practices. His diligence and commitment have resulted in a polished, flexible template that strengthens our core documentation pack.

A reference topic plays a vital role in any documentation set. It provides users with concise, structured descriptions of specific components or characteristics of an application, such as commands, configuration fields, UI elements, and more. Reference content should be easy to scan, helping users quickly locate key facts without wading through narrative or how-to material. To preserve this clarity, the template emphasizes limiting procedural or instructional content, keeping the focus on factual, descriptive information.

The updated reference template reflects these principles and is designed to integrate seamlessly with other templates in our core documentation pack. Its improvements make it especially valuable for open-source maintainers, developer advocates, and technical writers who need to present dense, technical information in a clean and predictable format. You can view the Reference template in our core documentation pack on GitLab.

We couldn’t be more grateful for Michael’s persistent and thoughtful work. Congratulations, Michael! Your contribution elevates the entire Good Docs template library and supports better documentation across countless projects.

For the Helix release cycle, Team Alpaca (Templates AMER/APAC) introduced an exciting proposal for a new type of template pack: the user-focused docs pack. This pack is designed to help writers plan and structure documentation from the user’s perspective, rather than centering solely on tools or features. It will include a collection of pre-planning and analysis templates that guide documentarians in understanding user goals, objectives, and workflows. Now that this pack is planned and added to the roadmap, we’re excited to begin working on the templates planned for this pack, starting in the next release cycle.

Team Dolphin (Templates AMER/EMEA) focused this cycle on exploring ways to strengthen the quality and consistency of community reviews for template projects. Their goal was to understand what makes a review effective and how contributors, both new and experienced, could provide thoughtful, actionable feedback.

For the Helix release, Team Dolphin led an initiative to develop recommended practices for community reviews. They ran a series of review experiments to improve community reviews within their working group and then discussed what went well with each experiment. In the next release cycle, they hope to socialize their findings with the other template working groups. This collaborative effort will help ensure that reviews across The Good Docs Project are consistent, constructive, and supportive, strengthening both our templates and our community culture.

The Template Editorial Team focused this cycle on refining the full workflow for handling editorial review requests from initial submission through to final approval. Their new process will go into effect next release cycle, ensuring faster template turnarounds and improved trust and communication between the editorial team and the template working groups.

In addition, they worked with members from Team Alpaca and Team Dolphin to test the new template quality checklists that they drafted during the previous release. These early beta tests received highly positive feedback from those who used the new checklists, giving the template editorial team confidence to roll out the checklists to the wider project in the next release cycle.

We’re thrilled to announce that Andrea Wright has joined the Project Steering Committee (PSC). Andrea has played a vital role as the lead of the Chronologue Editorial Team, and we want to recognize her outstanding service and dedication to the project. In this role, she has made numerous high-impact contributions, ensuring the quality of our Chronologue examples and mentoring Chronloguers to help them strengthen their proposals and drafts. Her guidance and expertise have been invaluable in supporting both the team and the broader community.

The Good Docs Project co-chairs (Alyssa Rock, Michael Park, and Valeria Hernandez) have been actively working on defining potential long-term themes and vision for the project, looking ahead for the next 2, 5, and 10 years in the project’s future. Once refined, these proposals will be presented to the PSC for further discussion. We’re grateful for their thoughtful leadership and continued dedication to shaping the future of our community.

Our Community Managers work tirelessly to ensure that our community remains healthy, vibrant, and welcoming for everyone who wants to participate. During this release cycle, they made several key contributions: they refined and improved the Git training workshop and established a policy for offboarding inactive community members. These efforts help strengthen the community’s structure, support leadership development, and maintain a safe and inclusive environment for all contributors.

Our Welcome Wagon onboarding model has been updated and we now host onboarding sessions twice per release cycle. Big thanks to Alyssa Rock for creating and organizing the Welcome Wagon. During the Helix release, we welcomed 15 new community members. Thanks to our improved and comprehensive onboarding guide created by the Knowledge Base working group, we’re seeing stronger retention, with more newcomers choosing to remain active community members after their initial onboarding.

The Knowledge Base working group develops curated content to support contributors across The Good Docs Project. Their current focus is a growing collection of articles designed specifically for new community members, helping them onboard smoothly and participate confidently in the Good Docs ecosystem. These resources provide clear guidance on essential topics such as navigating working groups, engaging in discussions, submitting contributions, and using project tools. By offering structured, accessible documentation, the team ensures that newcomers have the support they need to become active, informed, and empowered members of the community.

The Chronologue is a fictional documentation project that offers sample content to illustrate how The Good Docs Project’s templates can be used in real-world scenarios. Both Team Dolphin and Team Macaw continued their work this cycle on defining the core user personas for the three Chronologue documentation sets: OCTAVIA (the API documentation), KronoPy (the open-source community), and Zaius Inc. (the commercial software platform). This effort will help ensure that content across all three doc sets is tailored to the needs, goals, and workflows of their intended audiences.

The Chronologue working groups completed a new set of user personas. The Team Dolphin Working Group collaboratively created an expanded set for OCTAVIA’s APIs, including a lead developer, high-school teacher, project manager, researcher, and hobbyist.

The Tech Team is working on enhancing the system that automates Welcome Wagon registrations. The new registration is now live on the website and makes several improvements to allow new community members to register for the project more easily. These improvements will make onboarding new community members smoother, faster, and more reliable from this point forward.

The UX working group spent the release preparing a comprehensive report summarizing the insights from their user research conducted during the last cycle. These findings will be invaluable for guiding the project’s long-term vision and strategy. We greatly appreciate the team’s thorough work and thoughtful analysis, which provide a strong foundation for informed decision-making across the Good Docs Project.

For the Helix release, the Outreach working group completed The Good Docs Project’s public representation policy. This policy provides clear guidelines for how members should represent the project or speak about it in public forums, and it explains how the Outreach group can support them in doing so effectively.

The Outreach team also developed a slide deck on what makes documentation "good" and how to create it. Alyssa Rock and Carrie Wattula presented "From Code to Clarity: What Makes Good Docs?" to the Consortium for the Advancement of Scientific Software (CASS) community, from which they received thoughtful questions and valuable feedback. The team is grateful for the opportunity to share their work and learn from the broader community.

In addition, the Outreach squad continues to maintain and grow our blog. Stay tuned for an exciting announcement from the Outreach working group!