It is common for different groups within an organization to work in isolation. Engineering, product, customer support, marketing, and documentation teams may not collaborate on projects as often as they should.
HyperText has more features than plain text to level up your documentation.
- Training manuals
- User manuals
- Installation guides
- Troubleshooting guides
- Quickstart guides
- API documentation
- Tutorials
Make your open source project documentation dynamic so it appeals to users of all experience levels.
Some examples of product documentation include:
3 things you can achieve with a docathon
Docathon tip: During a docathon, participants can triage backlog items and complete them as they progress through the list. Non-technical participants can work on fixes related to typos, broken links, and other text-related issues.
1. No more backlog
Here are my top three reasons to host a docathon:
A docathon can fill gaps within content, restructure large documentation sets, fix broken links, or just correct typos. The intent behind hosting a docathon is to improve a large amount of documentation in a relatively brief timeframe.
2. Revamp large-scale guides
The next time your team has a seemingly insurmountable backlog or is tasked with restructuring a huge documentation project, consider hosting a docathon. It’s easy, and its productivity may surprise you. For more information on hosting an event like this, read Tiffany Long’s excellent 10-step guide to hosting a hackathon.
By the time your documentation team realizes it’s time to revamp a guide, it’s probably several chapters in and hundreds of pages deep. Once the content plan has been developed, the complexity of restructuring begins. Restructuring a large amount of documentation is not for the faint of heart.
3. Collaboration between cross-functional teams
[ Learn what it takes to build a resilient IT culture ]
Docathon tip: Enable cross-functional teams to come together for a common cause.
Imagine hosting an event where each team member can use their expertise to improve product documentation. Docathons foster subject matter expert (SME) diversity, real-time collaboration, and communication. They also allow for an inclusive environment where individuals residing in different geographical locations can participate in person or remotely. Your documentation receives the undivided attention of experts with different viewpoints and specializations, minimizing isolated siloes, unconscious bias, and burnout.
At my organization, our documentation team hosted a docathon and successfully revamped a 102-page installation guide. The docathon enabled us to focus on the project’s scope, which was reorganizing for simplicity, removing duplicate content, and following the customer journey. Hosting a docathon left a lasting impression on my team and improved customer success.
Documentation marathon
Documentation is critical to open source software projects. We asked our contributors what their favorite markup language is for documentation.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
