Google Season of Docs 2024

Rocket.Chat is applying to participate in Google Season of Docs 2024.

Google Season of Docs provides support for open-source projects to improve their documentation and allows professional technical writers to gain experience in open source. Together we raise awareness of open source, of docs, and of technical writing. The GSoD 2024 grants range from $5,000 to $15,000 depending on the project's budget.

Summary

1. How to apply
2. About our organization
3. Project Idea: Main Project Developer Documentation Audit and update
4. Timeline
5. Budget

How to apply

Rocket.Chat has a community server at http://open.rocket.chat

Interested technical writers, please contact us through the Google Seasons of Docs 2024 channel at https://open.rocket.chat/channel/gsod2024

See the official technical writer guide for more information.

About our organization

Rocket.Chat is one of the largest active open source (permissive MIT source license) communications platforms on GitHub, connecting thousands of global community contributors (across projects) from 30+ countries, with 38,500+ GitHub stars, 9800 forks, 875+ total releases, and 15,000+ issues since inception in 2015.

Rocket.Chat is a team chat platform written in full-stack Typescript. It offers a fully featured team chat experience on modern browsers, comparable to Slack and Microsoft Teams. Mobile and desktop clients run on iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, and Linux. The server can scale from a small family messaging server for 5 users on a Raspberry Pi 5, to clustered micro-services configuration that can support hundred thousands of users. On-premises Rocket.Chat can ensure 100% complete security and privacy of your valuable communications/data.

Rocket.Chat is now installed on over 500k servers and counts over 12m users worldwide. Federated communication support extends our reach exponentially.

Users can set up Rocket.Chat on cloud or by hosting their own servers on-premises. Thanks to its extension support via Rocket.Chat Apps, and rich APIs, startups and innovators have customized Rocket.Chat into new products and services. Omnichannel extends reach to wherever users may be including WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger and more. Increasingly, innovators in Generative AI and LLM app developers are launching their concepts on the Rocket.Chat platform which keeps all data flows and communications 100% private and secure.

Rocket.Chat has won multiple prizes such as a 2016 Bossie Award for Best Open Source Application and first prize in the 2017 edition of All Things Open’s Startup Competition.

Rocket.Chat's community interacts 24 x 7 at the community Rocket.Chat server https://open.rocket.chat since 2015.

Project ideas

Main Project Developer Documentation Audit and update

The Problem

Rocket.Chat, as an open-source communication platform, faces unique challenges in maintaining and enhancing its documentation to meet the dynamic needs of its diverse developer community. The existing documentation, while comprehensive, has been identified to have several areas needing improvement to better serve the project’s contributors, developer experience, and the community’s growing demands. Every day new contributors post questions about Development setup, contribution, and project best practices and this could lead some of them to give up contributing due to the lack of documentation in certain areas.

Existing documentation page: https://developer.rocket.chat

Project scope

The project includes only the main application project, which excludes any action inside of other documentations, such as: Desktop App, Mobile App, Apps-Engine, Chat Engine, and BOTS

• Check and analyze main project GitHub issues, Rocket.Chat forum, and community channels data to find the areas to improve the main project documentation
• Update main project documentation homepage with resources and fast links for most visited pages
• Reorganize documentation structure to better fit contributor needs and interests
• Rewrite and improve Contribution guidelines and How to start contributing
• Update the Server (main project) Repository Structure documentation with current structure and packages explanations
• Improve and update the troubleshooting page for the most common scenarios and systems that are reported in the community channels (GitHub, forum, and community channels)
• Create HowTo guides for:
  • Write unit and end-to-end test
  • Write front-end code
  • Write back-end code
  • Contribute to Internationalization/translations
  • Deploy Rocket.Chat with different methods (Docker, snap, etc...)

Out of scope

• Tech writers won't develop and change the GitHub project structure
• Tech writers won't be implementing new tools

How would we measure success?

• Reduction in GitHub issues related to contributor onboarding and environment setup issues
• Reduction in the number of open questions found in our public channels
• Increase in pull request numbers to the main project
• Increased coverage of well-known contributor pain points

What skills would a technical writer need to work on this project?

Must have:

• Demonstrated experience working with large and complex structured docs for developers.
• Basic technical understanding of modern web and CS concepts.

Nice to have: Ability to read Javascript/Typescript code is nice to have but not a must.

Timeline

The project will take approximately six months. Here's a timeline approximation of the deliverables.

Date	Action
May	Writer orientation
June	Project ramp-up
July	Re-organizing and re-structuring
August - November	Wriritng documentation
December	Feedbacks and adjustments

Budget

The budget consists of tech writer payment, swags, subscriptions, and up to 3 volunteers who would help us with testing and providing feedback on the timeline of the produced content.

Type	Amount	Running total	Notes
Tech writer payment	12000USD	12000USD
T-shirt swags	250USD	13000USD	Writer + 3 volunteers
Documentation Tool subscription	300USD	13300USD	Writer + Administrator
TOTAL		13300USD

Additional information

Rocket.Chat participated in Google Season of Docs 2019. We have a solid history of Google Summer of Code participation. We sincerely believe that participation in Google Season of Docs will help us greatly improve our understanding of documentation for our contributors community, and are eager to introduce interested professional tech writers to the world of open source.