Open Role: Technical Writers (evergreen) (iced)

[lianilychee]

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Open Austin strengthens civic engagement by connecting builders, community members, and organizations to address Austin’s structural barriers by developing skills and co-creating data-informed solutions. The bulk of Open Austin's volunteers are part of our Civic Digital Lab, where they co-create open source software and collaboratively conduct open data research with community partners.

ROLE DESCRIPTION

As the first volunteer technical writer ever, you’ll help our 4 Civic Digital Lab product teams start (and expand on) docs for three groups of audience: general public, prospective volunteers, and contributors. This role is flexible to your experience and range of expertise.

The 5 products:

1. Data Research Hub
2. Austin Public Library (APL) room reservations
3. Greater Austin Tenants Organizers (GATO) internal intelligence tool
4. One Bus mapper
5. (exempt) National Police Data Coalition (NPDC) police index

Your Responsibilities:
Depending on each team’s needs and your interests, you may:

• Improve or restructure team-specific volunteer onboarding materials
• Clarify project READMEs and/or technical overviews
• Translate technical information into plain-language summaries
• Propose and implement documentation templates or standards to build consistency across the Labs teams

Desired Outcomes

• General public can understand what each product is about
• New volunteers can start contributing faster, usually devs
• Product champions spend less time re-explaining the same information
• Docs are easier to find, easier to maintain, written in plain language, and clearly owned
• Labs teams become professional

Shared Responsibilities:

• Inculcating the culture of documentation amongst the teams

Not Your Responsibility:

• Logging onto the website’s WYSIWYG editor and editing it

Deliverables:

1. Product descriptions: Audience: General public, prospective vols. You can find our wildly-varying attempts in the Civic Digital Lab page's Learn more links
2. Guide to contributing: Audience: New vols that are in Step 3 and 4 of this sequence
3. (Up to your discretion) Product blurbs: Audience: General public, prospective vols. These are the one-sentence blurbs under each product team icon, also in the Civic Digital Lab page

TIMEFRAME

Evolving.

WHAT YOU'LL NEED

• Google account for Google Docs
• Slack account for communicating
• (optional) GitHub account for updating contributor-facing docs

WHO TO CONTACT?

Comment on this ticket or DM @Liani Lye on Slack

[CoolatMax]

@lianilychee Is this role still open ?

[jcklpe]

@lianilychee I think this might be stale or need updating. We have one person inquiring if the role is still open a few months back.

[iced-barista]

This is still an active need, to improve our product team and internal documentation but we don't have capacity to onboard right.