Application

What previous experience has your organization had in documentation or collaborating with technical writers?

Since 2008 we have been used MediaWiki for writing documentation - https://wiki.synfig.org/User_Documentation. There were a lot of volunteer community contributors since then. We have coordinated documentation writing via forums (https://forums.synfig.org/) and wiki’s talk pages. Also, we had a guidelines for contributors - https://wiki.synfig.org/Writer_Documentation

Initially the development of our documentation was mostly chaotic, as everyone contributed “what he could”. But at some points we made several efforts to re-structurize documentation. The workflow was following: a person responsible for documentation planning (it is similar to “mentor” role) created a structure of empty (stub) pages. Then others were filling them. We plan to stick the same plan during Season of Docs.

There are a lot of documentation pages were written, but many of them got outdated by this moment.

Also, as our practice shows, MediaWIki is not fits well for documentation - it is hard to maintain and not easy to track contributions (lots of chaotic noise coming). So, as part of Season of Docs we would like to migrate our documentation to Sphinx pages hosted on GitHub (ReadTheDocs). We already have positive experience in using it for writing Developer’s documentation - https://synfig-docs-dev.readthedocs.io/

What previous experience has your organization had mentoring individuals?

Our organization participated in Google Summer of Code in 2019. We had 2 students, both completed projects successfully, results of their work are merged into our project’s master branch and shipped for users with binary release. This year we are participating in Google Summer of Code again, got 3 slots granted.