'Open Documentation Academy' Offers On-Ramp To OSS

"Documentation authors at Canonical have launched the Open Documentation Academy to offer an easy way to get started contributing to open-source projects," writes longtime Slashdot reader tykev. From the blog post: Open and inclusive collaboration, and the sharing of ideas, remains the best way to develop software (and to do many other things!), but we also recognise that this "getting involved" step can be difficult. Where do you start? Who do you ask? What needs to be done? We all very much want to help people become open source contributors by building an on-ramp process. It may take some time, and we will need to adapt, but this is exactly why we've started our Open Documentation Academy.

To help you get involved, the Open Documentation Academy provides a curated list of documentation tasks. Choose one, let us know, and get started. Tasks include testing and fixing tutorials, updating the outdated, restructuring large documents, and anything else you may want to suggest. Our list is growing, and a big part of the Documentation Academy will be ensuring there's always a wide range of tasks available, across as many projects and technologies as possible. And of course, we're here to help. We'll guide you through your first contributions, provide advice on approaches, and help you build your confidence.

Isn't this just doing free work for Canonical?

[NobleNobbler]

Unemployed people everywhere rejoice at the ability to add value to Canonical in the name of "open-source"

A no brainer pitch for an executive with 0 downside

Re:

[tykev]

Fair point, but that's not the motivation. In the end, it's much simpler to write docs than to do all this (provide guidance, curate easy tasks, offer feedback, ...). This is meant as a way to encourage people to get involved with open source and offer an easy way to get started. Any open source.

good luck

[groobly]

I hope they succeed, but I am pessimistic. Any time I look at some collaborative documentation, it is basically useless for any question I'm trying to answer. The internet is generally a better source. So, AI distilling from other places is likely better than expecting people to just write random documentation.

I think the reason is that in those other places, people are answering actual questions posed by actual people, and the answerers actually want to help those people. General documentation for the sake of documentation has no such payoff.