Docathon

Prepare!

The best way to make sure something gets done is to make a clear, actionable plan.

For projects, you should identify parts of the documentation that could use improvement, and create issues so that people know what to work on. Here's an example of Matplotlib's Docathon project plan. Note how issues are tagged to make it clear which are easy contributions. Also, come up with a plan for how you'll get those changes merged! Make sure you have developer time to be response for new pull requests, and be welcoming to PRs for new contributors. We've put together a short guide that gives you some extra steps to take in preparing for the event.

For participants, you should think about some projects that you'd like to contribute to (even better if they're also signed up with the docathon). Check out our projects page if you want some inspiration. We've create a page for each project that has useful information to help you get started, including a list of open doc-related issues. For example, here is the matplotlib page. Some projects have even put together a specific page to handle documentation during the docathon. For more tips, here's a short list of ideas that you can follow to get started contributing to projects.

Tag your commits!

Any documentation commits should include the words "doc", "documentation", or "docathon" in the commit message. During the week, we'll be keeping track of stats on who's contributed. This will be displayed on our lovely stats page. Below are the current leaders in both projects and users. We'll update these plots a few times each day so that we can congratulate those that have made contributions. You can also click a plot to go to a summary page.

Projects

Users

That said, our biggest goal for the docathon is to push our community towards making their projects more people-friendly. If you can say that you've done this at the end of the week, then we'll be happy regardless of what kind of paper trail you leave behind.

Reach out

Since we're scattered all over the place, our goal is to provide a little community while we're all working on this together. We'll reach out periodically via email to give updates on progress that has been made, but we'd love to see discussion going on interactively. You can take these steps to connect with others during the docathon:

• Sign up for our slack chatroom. There are channels for general conversation, and a few for specific sites if you're working with one of the groups.
• Tune in to the tutorials via youtube on the first day. Or if you're in Berkeley, you should join us in person! Here's a list of topics that we'll cover.
• Find a working group in one of these locations. Each site has their own plan for how they'll structure work during the week. For example, BIDS will be working for a few hours in the afternoon each day (that's so we have an excuse to bring in coffee ;-) ).
• Be ready to discuss documentation in your projects! For many projects there will be a flurry of commits improving documentation. Make sure to chime in, discuss improvements that can be made, open issues for next steps, and generally work as a team to get things done.

We hope that these tips will be useful in getting you up and running with the docathon. Ultimately, we just want you all to have fun, and to come out of the week with a better, more beautiful set of open source docs. We're looking forward to working along with you soon!