: Re: Attracting and retaining volunteers to edit technical doc for open source projects I volunteer as an editor for the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN), an organization that creates free open source

@Cody1607638

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I'm multi-tasking at my current job where one of my duties is writing technical documents. I was in a team for the last 10 months whose job was creating the user, spare parts, quick-start manuals for 2 of the main product lines. Last week I've started creating the service workflows and how-to articles teaming with one senior field technician. This senior technician is very enthusiastic about the documentation project and willingly contributes his experience but doesn't lay his hand onto the keyboard to write anything. I don't want to lose this opportunity so I don't complain and do the writing, reviewing, editing etc part, too.

As a side job I'm acting as the scrummaster of the R&D department and trying to convince them to write everything, anyhow they want to express themselves promising them that I'm going to do the review-edit part. The R&D documentation project doesn't have any pressure or backing from the management so I'm having trouble convincing the R&D team to write down their procedures. None of them is willingly taking part.

My case is not exactly what you're dealing with but my experience tells me that writing is not for everyone and people mostly do rely on their memory to do their jobs. I only had success in convincing people to contribute to documentation in cases where the contributing party really needed this content and had someone willing to do the writing part of the job.

So I guess that in your case, you have to find out practical documentation necessities, be available for content contributers, announce it, and unfortunately do some voluntary writing and share it with the community. My guess is if you insist doing that for some time you'll start building up a little group of like minded writers (hopefully).

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