I love open source documentation and if you're reading this, maybe you do too.
I have a personal mantra of "Inspire, Educate, Motivate" and documentation fits right into that.
Documentation allows us to educate others to a near infinite scale.
You know, I partially owe my career to the free and accessible Linux server documentation that is available on the Linode Docs website.
I'm a die-hard Ubuntu user but I can't tell you the countless times the Arch Linux Wiki has helped me out of tight spots.
Docs are invaluable.
I want to motivate more people to contribute and learn from one another on how we can make better contributions and better doc websites.
DocsThursday is a party, campaign, workshop, or whatever you want to call it to create and contribute to open source documentation on the 3rd Thursday of every month.
Why DocsThursday?
There's nothing special about Thursdays.
I could have done a Docs Wednesday or Friday but it wasn't as catchy and we all know Tuesdays are for tacos.
So Thursday it is.
DocsThursday is inspired by DigitalOcean's Hacktoberfest, 24 Pull Requests, and most importantly, Write the Docs's Writing Day.
I'm trying to take the energy and productivity of Writing Day and replicate it more frequently at meetups local to you, with your co-workers within your company, and even online as a hackathon.
Let's take 30 minutes, an hour or even more, just once a month in order to give some love to open source documentation.
Interested? Check out the website, DocsThursday.com.
Would you like to help out?
DocsThursday is brand new and I'm still figuring out what to do with it.
The website is open source and built with Hugo.
Feel free to open PRs to improve the website or open Issues to ask questions or start discussions.
You can also start discussions/ask questions here in the comments or message me on Twitter.
If you've had these feelings or similar ideas, speak up!
Let's do this together. 😄
P.S. The first DocsThursday is February 21st.
I run the Write the Docs NYC meetup and we're hosting an event in New York for DocsThursday.
If you're around, check it out.
If you're not, start one in your area on the 21st and I'll list it on the DocsThursday website for people to find.
Top comments (11)
This is such a great idea Ricardo! I'm gonna be hosting a DocsThursday after work at our office on 21st with some colleagues.
That's great to hear! Hopefully you'll come back and let us know how it went?
We had such a great time! @jamesstoneco gave a nice presentation/discussion starter, we talked about what makes good documentation and then worked on open source projects, ate pizza and had a good time.
Wow! Thank you so much for sharing this, this is inspiring. Would it be okay if I shared this on Twitter and/or the website?
Sure! I also tweeted about it (twitter.com/futurice/status/109862...) if you want to share that tweet.
I will also be writing about it to our company blog, I can share it here once it's ready if you want to share that too as a showcase.
That would be appreciated.
So I wrote a blog post to our company blog about it: futurice.com/blog/improving-docume....
I will! We have an open source and social impact program called Spice at work which allows our people to work on open source projects on their free time and get compensated. DocsThursday fits that perfectly and many of my colleagues were already excited about the event!
Sounds good.
Hey Ricardo!
How was your first event in NYC?