Join us

The Good Docs Project is a global community of technical writers, doc tools experts, software engineers, and UX designers who are committed to improving the quality of documentation in open source software and beyond. If our mission sounds interesting and inspiring to you, we would love to have your help!

If you work in or aspire to work in the tech industry, our community can help you develop new skills and enhance your existing ones. Most people who join our project develop or improve skills in:

If you are new to software or technical writing, participating in our project is like having a high quality internship where you can practice and apply these skills with guided mentorship.

If you are an experienced technical writer or software engineer, our project gives you a chance to enhance and perfect your existing skills. You also get opportunities to socialize and exchange ideas or best practices in collaboration with other expert practitioners in the tech industry. Over time, you will also have opportunities to grow skills as a leader and mentor others in a fun, low-stakes environment.

No matter your experience level, participating in our project helps you grow your professional network and develop long-lasting friendships with people all over the world. Many of our community members stay with the project for several years because of the friendships they make here.

What does it mean to join The Good Docs Project as a contributor? The main thing to know is that joining our project means joining at least one of our working groups. Each working group meet for 1 hour every week.

We have a variety of working groups available to you and hopefully one of those working groups will match your schedule. See our community calendar for specific working group times. These meetings are open to the public if you would like to drop in and see what they are like before officially joining.

After you join, you’ll work choose a personal task or project to work on. That will typically be something like:

In addition to your individual project, you’ll work collaboratively with members of your working group on your group’s team goal for that release cycle.

With that in mind, most community members give about 1-2 hours of their time every week. Generally you can expect to spend an hour attending a working group meeting and maybe an additional hour working on your own personal task or project.

To get started in our community, register to attend an upcoming Welcome Wagon meeting using the registration form in the next section. During this 1-hour online onboarding meeting, you will:

Welcome Wagon sessions are held four times a year, with several options to fit various time zones. Sessions take place in:

In order to register for this meeting, fill out the following Welcome Wagon registration form. We respect your privacy, and this information is only shared with a small set of project leaders on a strictly need-to-know basis.

After submitting this form, you’ll receive an automated welcome message and an invite to the Welcome Wagon meeting time you selected.