Session: 2 for 1: The New OSS Community: Enabling for advocates not customers / Making Content Decisions Between Open Source and Enterprise Versions of a Software Product

The New OSS Community: Enabling for advocates not customers – Andrea Griffiths

Built and maintained by people like you, open-source software powers the global economy. Sustainability of this ecosystem is pivotal to accelerate human progress; yet many organizations focus their community building efforts as a sales pipeline, or a program to deflect requests for support.

In this talk I’d share tools to engage your communities in a positive, nurturing way; with a servants approach to building community and centered on creating advocacy, loyalty, and ultimately business value.

Making Content Decisions Between Open Source and Enterprise Versions of a Software Product – Art Berger & Shane O’Donnell

Many contributors to the open source community have “day jobs” that might include incorporating open source technologies into their company’s enterprise products. Because of the publicly available nature of open source technology, communities can have a diverse range of backgrounds and skillsets, which can lead to the challenge of providing onboarding information to help people understand and use the technology. Projects often incorporate other open source projects, making it even more complicated to decide how much of the underlying technology to document in the current product so that users know how to get started. Documentation is often cited as both an area of opportunity to improve accessibility and also a barrier to usage due to the poor quality or lack of content, per annual surveys such as conducted by GitHub and StackOverflow.

This case study shares how a cloud software development startup maintains documentation for both its open source projects and the enterprise products that are based on those projects. In this talk, you’ll learn about the company’s content strategy through a rubric that guides documentation decisions. The rubric is situated within the context of the open source community, the company’s business objectives, as well as within the concerns of the field of technical writing, such as content development, usability, accessibility, and discoverability.

The rubric is divided into three parts: decisions about the content itself, content operations for lifecycle maintenance, and content access. Examples for each area are shared, such as automated changelog and CLI documentation. Although the examples are drawn from products that are based on the Kubernetes, Envoy, and Istio open source projects, the take-aways can be applied to any documentation products that use incorporate other open source projects.