Jenkins GSoD application draft, 2020

The data below represents the Google Season of Docs 2020 application draft.

Organization Profile

Org admins

Org description

Jenkins, originally founded in 2006 as "Hudson", is one of the leading automation servers. The project’s motto is "Build great things at any scale". Using extensible, plugin-based architecture developers have created hundreds of plugins to adapt Jenkins to a multitude of build, test, and deployment automation workloads. Jenkins is open-source, MIT License is used for most of the components.

The project has thousands of active contributors working on Jenkins core, plugins, website, project infrastructure, localization activities, and, of course, documentation. We invite technical writers to join the community and contribute to the documentation being used by millions of Jenkins users worldwide.

What previous experience has your organization had in the 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.

In the Jenkins project, we believe that documentation is as important as code. In 2019, we introduced an official Documentation Officer role and started a Documentation special interest group (https://jenkins.io/sigs/docs/) which, among other things, coordinates the Google Season of Docs application in the project. We have several documentation initiatives listed on our project roadmap: https://jenkins.io/project/roadmap/. The Documentation SIG facilitates documentation improvement across the organization. In the last quarter, we had 219 unique documentation committers in the organization.

We have extensive documentation on the jenkins.io website (https://jenkins.io/doc/) as well as the plugin site (http://plugins.jenkins.io/). This repository has a copy-editors team which assists submitters with reviews of their documentation. A large majority of Jenkins components and plugins also have documentation in GitHub and other resources, including user, administrator, developer, and contributor guidelines. The Jenkins project hosts a repository for technical specifications called the Jenkins Enhancement Proposals https://github.com/jenkinsci/jep.

The Jenkins project follows the documentation-as-code approach for all new documentation, and we use industry-standard tools (Git/GitHub) and markup languages (AsciiDoc, GitHub Flavored Markdown) so that Jenkins contribution provides relevant and widely applicable experience to technical writers.

The Jenkins project has a wealth of knowledge working with technical writers. A portion of the Jenkins documentation has been created by professional technical writers whose time was donated to the project by company contributors. We previously had several coordinated documentation initiatives, e.g. creation of new documentation for Jenkins Pipeline. We also facilitate documentation contributions and encourage newcomers to participate (https://jenkins.io/participate/#document), regardless of their experience with Jenkins and our tools. We also invest time in contributing guidelines for documentation contributors, e.g. here are our contributing guidelines for the website: https://github.com/jenkins-infra/jenkins.io/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.adoc.

Reviews: jenkins.io and GitHub documentation are managed and reviewed via pull requests. For example, there are contribution guidelines for jenkins.io: https://github.com/jenkins-infra/jenkins.io/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.adoc. In the project, we also have a team of copy-editors who review the content: https://github.com/orgs/jenkins-infra/teams/copy-editors. Contributions to Jenkins component documentation (e.g. plugin docs) are usually reviewed by maintainers.

We also have channels specifically dedicated to the documentation. These channels act as an additional contact point for technical writers in the community:

What previous experience has your organization had mentoring individuals?

Comment: 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.

Jenkins project has successfully participated in Google Summer of Code and Outreachy before, including both programs in 2019 (https://jenkins.io/projects/gsoc/). Last year we also ran our first mentorship on CommunityBridge: https://www.jenkins.io/projects/jcasc/dev-tools/. In 2019 we had 12 mentees in total. The Jenkins project has also been selected for Google Summer of Code 2020. The project also has many contributors whose roles at work include mentoring people (university professors and advisors, training leads, developer relations, senior engineers and tech writers). As an organization, we do not have particular experience in mentoring technical writers, but we do have experience in onboarding documentation contributors to the community. We also work on onboarding programs for documentation contributors, e.g. for website copy-editors: https://github.com/jenkins-infra/jenkins.io/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.adoc#maintainer-guide.

How many technical writers does your organization want to mentor this year?

1