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If you are interested in the prospect of creating a \u201cculture of docs\u201d in open source software (OSS) communities–or if you just love civil engineering metaphors–this The Docs Are In episode<\/a> is for you. This time around Kate<\/a> and I interview Abigail McCarthy, who has some very fancy titles: 1) Staff Technical Open Source Communications Manager at VMware and 2) Kubernetes SIG Docs<\/a> Localization Subproject Lead. Abbie landed at VMware through its acquisition of Heptio (a company built around Kubernetes<\/a>), and describes her day job as such:<\/p>\n What I try to do in my day to day job is to help open source communities build out docs communities and docs culture within their open source projects. So figuring out processes, trying to help get people involved, actually creating the docs on time for release. So going through all that process and really being an advocate for documentation within open source communities.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n We then jump into how Abbie got into tech writing (TL;DR: \u201caccidentally\u201d), and it is worth noting that I had the great privilege of working with Abbie at her first tech writing gig at Apprenda (where she began engaging with the Kubernetes community). Having both Abbie and Kate (who I worked with in our pre-Monk days at Georgia Tech) in the same docs-related conversation was an absolute delight for me, and we cover a LOT of ground in the remainder of the conversation:<\/p>\n On this last point, Abbie calls out the importance of creating \u201cbridges\u201d to help get folks–especially writers–more comfortable engaging with OSS projects:<\/p>\n I think there could also be some more general advocacy and outreach to technical writing communities to get folks a little more engaged. And I think there might be a little more pieces to do \u2014 a little more bridge work to get folks who maybe don\u2019t have as technical of a background more help within certain projects to get to the point where they feel more comfortable engaging in a more long term, sustainable way.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n We then get to the importance of creating a \u201cculture of docs,\u201d which Abbie describes as such:<\/p>\n To keep documentation on par with all of the project work you are doing \u2014 being the code work that you are doing–so that you can make sure that all of these pieces go together and they all have kind of a through line so that when you get to your release or get to wherever you are, you\u2019ll be able to present your users or be able to remember yourself what was happening when you were doing something along the way.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n She then elaborates on how influential this can be on the larger community:<\/p>\n I like the idea of creating a culture–a positive culture–and it\u2019s not a chore because a lot of times some people have that perception that documentation is a chore or an afterthought. But if you start it right from the beginning and say, \u201cThese are the things that are important to our project,\u201d it will just become ingrained in the layout of your community anyway and just become a part of how people work within your community.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I love the concept of a \u201cculture of docs\u201d and also that a project as successful as Kubernetes has created a strong docs culture within its larger community (and managed to bring a documentarian like Abbie into the fold).<\/p>\n You can watch the video of this conversation below or see the full transcript and related links<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n