Season of Docs 2020 Organization Application - sympy/sympy GitHub Wiki
This is the organization application for GSoD (Google Season of Docs). If you are a technical writer interested in applying for GSoD, please see GSoD 2020 Ideas.
A * after the question means it is required.
Open source organization information
Open source organization's email address *
This email address is used for contacting your open source organization about Season of Docs and is published on the Season of Docs website. It is used by the Google program administrators and technical writer participants to contact your organization. You are strongly advised not to use a personal email address as the email address for contacting your open source organization.
Note from Aaron: Google uses this email to send out the applications, which is why it is my private email. We will add instructions for the tech writers to email our mailing list to our organization page.
Open source project name *
Enter the name of the open source project that is participating in the Season of Docs.
SymPy
Link to the open source project *
Enter the URL of your open source website or repository.
Open source project description *
This description is published on the Season of Docs website.
SymPy is a Python library for symbolic mathematics. It aims to become a full-featured computer algebra system (CAS) while keeping the code as simple as possible in order to be comprehensible and easily extensible. SymPy is written entirely in Python.
Link to your organization’s page about Season of Docs
If your organization has a web page or blog post dedicated to Season of Docs, enter the URL here. You can supply this link later too.
https://github.com/sympy/sympy/wiki/GSoD-2020-Ideas
Optional stipend
Indicate whether your organization wants to receive a mentor stipend for this year’s program. For more information, see stipends for mentor organizations at https://goo.gl/34Q8WK.
Does your organization want to accept the mentor stipend? *
Yes
Organization's previous experience
This section provides the Season of Docs program administrators with information on your open source organization's previous experience with mentorship and working with documentation or technical writers.
What previous experience has your organization had in documentation or collaborating with technical writers?
If you or any of your mentors have worked with technical writers before, or have developed documentation, mention this in your answer. Describe the documentation that you produced and the ways in which you worked with the technical writer. For example, describe any review processes that you used, or how the technical writer's skills were useful to your project. Explain how this previous experience may help you to work with a technical writer in Season of Docs.
We participated in GSoD last year with a successful project https://github.com/sympy/sympy/wiki/GSoD-2019-Report-Lauren-Glattly:-SymPy-Documentation-Style-Guide. The project produced a style guide for our docstrings. We met on a weekly video call. For the beginning of the project, we discussed ideas on Google Docs, but once things reached a state where the style guide started to be written, we moved to a GitHub pull request so that the broader SymPy community could review it. The resulting style guide can be found here https://docs.sympy.org/dev/documentation-style-guide.html.
Prior to last year's GSoD, we (the org admins and mentors) have not worked with technical writers within the scope of SymPy, but some of us have worked with them in professional settings as part of our jobs, so we are familiar with what technical writers do and how to best utilize them to improve documentation.
What previous experience has your organization had mentoring individuals?
If you or any of your mentors have taken part in Google Summer of Code or a similar program that mentors individuals, mention this in your answer. Describe your achievements in that program. Explain how this experience may influence the way you work in Season of Docs.
We have participated in Google Summer of Code every year since 2007, mentoring over 80 students. Almost all of those projects have been successful. This is partly because we are very careful about only selecting students that we believe will be successful, and partly because of various requirements we have during the summer, for example, requiring students and mentors to meet at least once a week, requiring students to blog weekly, etc.
For Google Season of Docs, we will use what we have learned from Google Summer of Code. For instance, we will only accept applications for GSoD that are very high quality, so as to avoid the possibility of a technical writer failing the project. If we don't get enough good applications we won't accept someone just to fill a slot. Instead we will just give the slot(s) back to Google, because accepting someone who would end up failing the project will only waste our time as mentors. During the program, we will meet weekly with the technical writer to discuss updates on the project, and will be generally available during the rest of the week to answer any questions or concerns.
We also understand that GSoD is different from GSoC. Unlike GSoC, where the participants are students, GSoD participants are working professionals. Thus, we expect the mentoring experience to be more bi-directional. The technical writers will learn from us about how to contribute to our project, but we will also learn from them about how to improve our documentation. Also unlike GSoC, where students are expected to work full time, GSoD technical writers generally only work a fraction of their time on GSoD (say, 20 hours a week). Finally, one of the most important differences is that technical writers are likely to not be coders, and may be completely new to things like version control. As mentors, we are expected to 1) help the technical writer learn the basics of version control, GitHub pull requests, etc., and 2) directly assist them with any challenges that come up as part of the project that require coding to solve. We did both of these things as part of last year's GSoD project and we were successful at it.
Mentoring capacity
Your organization must have at least two open source mentors for each technical writing project/technical writer that you plan to accept for this year's Season of Docs. You need the mentors to help during the technical writer exploration and application phases, as well as during doc development.
Season of Docs 2020 plans to allocate one or two technical writers per organization. Your request for one or two technical writers won't affect whether we choose your organization, but we need to know how many technical writers your organization wants to mentor so that we can accept the correct number of organizations to fill all the available technical writing slots.
Mentors who are not also organization administrators must register independently.
DIRECT THE MENTORS TO REGISTER AT https://bit.ly/gsod-mentor-reg.
How many technical writers does your organization want to mentor this year? *
1 or 2
2
Technical writing project ideas
Work with your mentors to create a project ideas list. This list should include one or more documentation projects that you'd like a technical writer to tackle during this year's Season of Docs. You should publish your project ideas on a public web page, in a blog post, or in some other publicly visible document and include a link to the document in this section.
See the detailed guidelines on creating your project ideas list at https://goo.gl/cF7zRt.
Link to project ideas list *
Enter the URL of a publicly accessible list of your organization's project ideas.