Layer5
Layer5.io is applying to participate in Google Season of Docs 2024.
Google Season of Docs provides support for open-source projects to improve their documentation and allows professional technical writers to gain experience in open source. The technical writer will collaborate with other engineers and core mentors.
Together we raise awareness of open source, of docs, and of technical writing. The GSoD 2024 grants range from $5,000 to $15,000 depending on the project's budget.
Summary
- About Layer5 and its projects
- About Meshery
- About our community
- How to apply
- Project Idea: Meshery’s users facing doc audit and update
- Timeline
- Budget
- Additional information
About Layer5 and its projects
The Layer5 community represents the largest collection of cloud native projects and their maintainers in the world. Our inclusive and diverse community stewards projects to provide learning environments, create and implement cloud native industry standards, deployment and operational best practices, benchmarks and abstractions, and more. Our pay-it-forward mentality with every contributor (mentee or not) is a shared commitment by all maintainers (and MeshMates - contributor onboarding buddies) to the open source spirit that pushes Layer5 projects like Meshery forward. New members are always welcome.
About Meshery
A self-service engineering platform, Meshery, is the open source, cloud native manager that enables the design and management of all Kubernetes-based infrastructure and applications (multi-cloud). Among other features, As an extensible platform, Meshery offers visual and collaborative GitOps, freeing you from the chains of YAML while managing Kubernetes multi-cluster deployments.
Additionally, Meshery boasts an impressive growth trajectory, ranking as the 10th fastest growing project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) with 4900+ GitHub stars, 430+ total releases and 1500+ GitHub forks.
About our Community
Layer5 is all about its community of contributors. We have designed an onboarding program customized to meet newcomers where they’re at and developed an onboarding buddy program, MeshMates with individuals dedicated to assisting contributors. Layer5 and Meshery have been around for 4+ years and have a healthy, growing community of 5000+ community members. The layer5.io website itself is open source and created by 521+ of our contributors.
How to Apply
We interact daily over Slack
Interested writers please contact us through #documenation Layer5 slack channel, or mail us at community@layer5.io
If you have further question on participating or how to get started, please ask them in any public Layer5 slack channel so that others can also learn from answers to your questions, please visit Layer5 Discuss Forum for previous questions asked by other contributors.
Visit official technical writer guide for more information
Project Ideas
Meshery’s user-facing doc audit and update
The problem:
Meshery is a open source cloud-native management platform with over 200+ integrations and experiencing significant growth in contributions over the past few years, Meshery has continuously evolved to enhance the user experience. New features have been introduced, and Meshery's internal architecture has been improved to meet the demands of its user base.
However, with this rapid development, we have identified many new contributors and Meshery’s users post questions on project best practices, tutorials with various integrations and contributions in Meshery which lead some of them to give up contributing or using Meshery due to lack of documentation in certain areas.
Meshery’s documentation - https://docs.meshery.io/
Project Scope
- Check and analyze Meshery’s documentation to identify areas for improvement. Gather data from GitHub issues and the Layer5 #documentation Slack channel.
- Explore Meshery’s existing architecture and UI at playground.meshery.io to pinpoint areas not covered in the current documentation or areas needing improvement.
- Meshery integrates with numerous technologies. Select your area of proficiency and technology, then create a new learning path for it. Refer to GitHub issue #9832 for more information.
- Identify outdated information and update it with the latest features and functionalities.
- Enhance Meshery’s troubleshooting pages by incorporating the most common scenarios reported by Meshery’s users and contributors.
- Update Meshery’s README with the latest functionalities and visuals.
- Restructure the documentation layout to better align with the needs and interests of users.
How We Would Measure Success
- Increase in the number of closed issues tagged with “area/docs.”
- Feedback from users on how intuitive the documentation is (qualitative - tracked through user polls)
- Increased number of learning paths.
- Increased coverage on addressing common challenges experienced by contributors and users.
Required Skills for a Technical Writer
Must-Have:
- Technical writing experience.
- Familiarity with GitHub.
- Strong organizational skills.
- Ability and willingness to seek feedback from the target audience, and use this feedback to improve the documentation.
Nice to Have -
- Basic knowledge of Kubernetes.
- Familiarity with Jekyll and JavaScript.
Volunteers
Uzair Shaikh, Aabid Sofi, Yash Sharma, can help with answering questions about Meshery
Vivek Vishal, Archit Sharma, happy to review docs pull requests
Ritik Saxena can help with creating visuals/GIFs
We will bring support from the Meshery CI WG, provide a full-time visual and user experience designer and well as three dedicated core maintainers of Meshery. We have one strong technical writing candidate for this project. We will support this technical writer and prioritize any dependencies on the project or community that they may have.
Project budget
| Budget Item | Amount | Running Total | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Technical Writer stipend | $7,000 | $7,000 | Technical writer is expected to learn much and be diligent with their efforts. They should be well rewarded. | |
| Mentor volunteer stipend | $500 | $7,500 | This volunteer mentor will be put much time into the project and into the success of the technical writer; should be rewarded. | |
| Microphone for Technical Writer for remote collaboration | $150 | $7,650 | Clear communication is key to successful, remote collaboration. This is meant to facilitate collaboration, be a reward for participating, and be useful long-term for the technical writer. | |
| Total: | $7,650 |
Timeline
The project is expected to last around six months. Below is an estimated timeline of the deliverables.
| Date | Action |
|---|---|
| May | Technical writer orientation |
| June | Drafting areas of improvement, Feedback, Refine |
| July - October | Writing documentation |
| November | Feedback and adjustments |
List of Org Admins
Additional information
We will create a new set of interactive documentation for Meshery users to both learn how to use Meshery. We have a number of community volunteers lined up and committed to collaboration on the enhancement of existing documentation. The technical writer will collaborate with other engineers, working with Jekyll and Docusaurus.
Previous experience with technical writers or documentation
Our mentors have managed teams of technical writers working on documenting enterprise-grade software at large technology companies (Cisco, Seagate, SolarWinds). During the span of time, he has worked with technical writers in DITA and post-DITA environments (from Word to FrameMaker, structured writing, online help, various CMSes, git). Our mentors have worked with technical writers on documentation strategy, creating document sets, covering the full spectrum of reader personas.
Previous participation in Season of Docs, Google Summer of Code or others:
Layer5 and its mentors have participated as mentors in MLH, LFX, FOSSASIA, GSoD 2020, GSoC 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and are in 2024 under CNCF. Mentoring and seeing others learn and grow is what Layer5 is all about - it’s a platform for mentees to hoist themselves up on and leapfrog from. We’re a platform for shared success.
We interact daily over Slack, and have an open source project meeting everyday, which are posted to the community YouTube channel.
