Sunday 19 September 2021

Open source peer bonuses

 

open source peer bonus logo

Congratulations Alyssa, Angelos and Aiden for your Google's Open Source Peer Bonus award.  This cool award enables Google employees to recognize and thank a few valued open source contributors. It includes a token financial contribution - enough to take the family out for dinner at a nice restaurant.

Alyssa Rock

Alyssa has played a pivotal role in growing and expanding, The Good Docs Project. She has been doing this by:

  1. Being an excellent technical writer, prolifically writing quality material for the project.
  2. Reaching out at conferences and related events, advocating for the project, and attracting scores of new contributors.
  3. Pro-actively helping establish a very supportive and inclusive culture, leading by example, being incredibly warm and encouraging in helping to onboard people, and writing our code-of-conduct.
  4. Stepping up to do much of the grunt work to establish community processes.
  5. Doing the many other small things that help make an open source project successful.

Angelos Tzotsos

Angelos has been a lynch pin contributor to many of the geospatial open source projects. Most notably, he is one of the primary coordinators of the OSGeo-Live linux distribution of open source geospatial software, supporting the 50+ projects represented to get the software up to scratch and compiling on the distribution. He is very competent, always humble, very wise, always supportive of others, and very effective at building open source communities. Notably, he has been voted onto the board of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation.

Aidan Doherty 

Aidan has been a steady and reliable contributor to The Good Docs Project, taking on core background tasks, like community building (kicking off an unofficial welcoming committee for new members), and setting up a base template working group (from which all of the rest of our project templates will depend.) He takes on the unglamorous but important work which makes an open source project successful.

Timeless documentation

Big Ben clock

Maintaining docs for an evolving software baseline is a constant pain for us technical writers. I'm often helping developers remove time based language from docs, and was surprised that I couldn't find best practices on how to apply this.

So we've added a timeless documentation section to the Google developer documentation style guide. Timeless documentation is documentation that avoids words and phrases that anchor the documentation to a point in time or assume knowledge of prior or future products and features. So while it is okay to reference "a new feature" in news article; "latest" or "new" shouldn't be used in reference docs. The content becomes outdated soon after publication.

You can read more about it in the Google developer documentation style guide.