Documentation community meeting: April 4th

Documentation
21

“Working Group” is a formal term defined by the PSF Bylaws, Article VII.
To form a WG, you need a charter, voting process, and other formalities. These formalities are tricky, and my impression is that several people got burned out trying to do them. (IMO that’s the part Guido refers to by “a bit much into the work of being an organization and not enough into actually documenting stuff”)
The current charter draft is at CPython Documentation Workgroup - Documentation Community documentation and the pain point is writing up the onboarding process (Adding and onboarding new workgroup members - Documentation Community documentation).
If anyone wants to help finalize that, let me know and I can give you pointers. I thought this is where I wanted to help, but then I realized it actually isn’t.

IMO, these formalities are also entirely unnecessary to improve documentation. But using “WG” for something that’s not a formal PSF Working Group would be misleading.
Hence, “Docs Community”. Anyone is free to join, members don’t have any special powers, and so maintaining a member list would (IMO) be a waste of time. It’s more of a set of discussion platforms than an organization, really:

  • if you want to stay in the loop and discuss major decisions, follow this category on Discourse
  • if you want to hang out and discuss in real time, join the Discord
  • if you want to help, hit the GitHub issues (or ask on any of the above)

If you want to formalize, describe and clarify this, please go ahead and send pull requests! Pruning might be as helpful as additions.

2 Likes
22

Thanks for the clarification!

23

A few clarifications here for everyone:

  1. The Docs Working Group is a Python Steering Council governed group. It was never intended to be a PSF working group. See CPython Documentation Workgroup - Documentation Community documentation
  2. The intent from the start was to create 2 groups:
  • a Docs Working Group will focus on meeting monthly to provide a conflict resolution process for content that is not be resolved by the community. The Working Group would also be responsible for setting the vision for new documentation that needs creation.
  • a Docs Community team which is a community of individuals who are interested in creating new documentation, creating style guides, and tooling. This group also meets monthly as stated at the start of this thread.
  1. The current Docs Working Group is made up of Mariatta, Ned Bachelder, Julian Pallard and myself. Its charter was accepted by the Python Steering Council in 2021. Due to my personal schedule, I have not had the bandwidth to kick off the process for adding additional members. We will announce to the community when that is ready to happen.

I’ll discuss this in more detail in today’s meeting. I will also try to add more information to the documentation about the Docs Working Group and Docs Community Team. Documentation Community documentation

Thanks everyone for your support, interest and patience. :snake: :snake:

7 Likes
24

That is even more clarifying; thank you so much!

1 Like