Docathon

What's a docathon?

It's kind of like a hackathon, but focused on developing material and tools for documentation. Hackers of all skill-levels are welcome. The docathon will be held in late February, 2017, stay tuned for more details on dates. It will hopefully be the first of many docathons to come!

Why a docathon?

Everybody knows how important documentation is. However, as important as it is, we often don't give documentation enough attention. Docstrings are incomplete or missing argument explanations, examples don't compile or reveal outdated APIs, tutorials are often idiosynchratic (or not even there). The docathon is about changing that.

How Do I Join In?

All you need is a project to work on that isn't your regular day job. We recommend you choose something open, perhaps on GitHub or Bitbucket, so that others can see your progress. In the coming weeks we'll send out a formal call for ideas and projects, and you can sign up then either as a project host or as a contributor.

Participate

What can I do at the docathon?

There are two main ways to get involved with the docathon.

First, you can offer a project that could use some documentation love. This might be an open-source package that is lacking in examples, that needs docstring improvements, or that simply needs somebody other than the author to make decisions about how to describe things. It could also be a tool or codebase that is designed to help with documentation or make it more effective.

Second, you can offer your own time during the docathon to work on the projects that are officially on-board. Alternatively, you can work on your own personal projects (so long as you're working on documentation!).

We'll have a list of projects with (mostly) clearly-defined projects that could be tackled over the course of the week. This will be the main watering hole for both listing and finding projects to work on.

If you have a project you'd like to include in the docathon:

Check back here soon. We'll post a link to sign up in a few weeks.

If you're interested in participating in the docathon

Check back here soon. We'll post a link to sign up in a few weeks.