The first Mattermost Docathon is being held from July 26th to August 6th 2021. Take a look at our blog post if you haven't already.
A docathon is a hackathon for product documentation.
Documentation isn't written in a vacuum, and it's important to see the customer’s documentation journey through the eyes of our Mattermost community. The best way to do that is to get our community involved! Documentation is also a great way to get started on your open source contribution journey as it's usually how you get to know the product.
The Docathon is designed to provide opportunities for all contributors to get involved, whether new to open source or seasoned contributors. Help us solve technical tooling challenges. Write mobile steps for Mattermost messaging tasks. Correct inaccuracies and inconsistencies. Add or update screenshots, labeled images, animated GIFs, and videos. How do you want to improve the Mattermost product documentation?
Absolutely! Here are some ways you can get involved:
- Help us merge PR submissions: This includes helping us go through the PRs with the Docathon 2021 label, making sure PRs follow our style guide, and fixing any grammatical issues. This isn't an extremely rigorous process - we just want to make sure anything merged follows some standardization.
- Help review technical content for accuracy: Actively monitor the ~Docathon 2021 channel, respond to questions, and engage community members who post with questions or concerns. You can also help by being open to contributors messaging you directly if they have questions and prefer not to ask in the public channel, and relay any feedback back to the Technical Writing team.
- Help us with Linked In recommendations or endorsements for top contributors: This is particularly welcome in cases where, during PR reviews, you encounter Docathon contributors you want to network with and whose professional career you want to support.
- Contribute your own content or ideas for either Mattermost product documentation, or the Docathon event itself!
A valid contribution is one that isn't done just for the sake of submitting a PR, but one that fixes an error, improves existing content, or adds value to our product documentation. While there are no penalties for submitting invalid Docathon PRs, if you're not sure how to contribute, please ask us how to get involved - we're more than happy to help get you started.