Last week, we were delighted to find out that we had been accepted into the 2024 Google Season of Docs (GSoD) cohort. This post covers a bit about GSoD, the project plans we have, as well as answering some frequently asked questions that have been coming up.
What is the Google season of Docs?
Google Season of Docs aims to provide support for open source projects seeking to improve the documentation of their projects. Beyond simply providing funding for this, the program also provides guides and additional support to help organisations to understand and execute on their documentation needs.
What are our project plans?
Given the scale and urgency of the climate crisis, and the significant role that the internet plays in emitting and helping mitigate emissions, it is critical that more people can estimate the carbon impact of their digital technologies and take meaningful climate action. CO2.js is one of the leading open source projects for doing just this. It has a track record of working in the open and being adopted by major open source and commercial projects.
On a daily basis we hear from technologists who want to get involved. However, we’ve lacked the resources to document the contribution pathways in a welcoming and effective way. With the support of the Google Season of Docs, we can build more robust documentation that orientates people to the project and how they can contribute to it on the path to a fossil-free internet. Ultimately, we see CO2.js as a maturing project in a growing, open ecosystem of digital sustainability tools.
Key areas of focus
Detailing Contribution Guidelines for CO2.js Documentation
First of all, we’ll be investing some time into making it easier to make contributions – this involves funnily enough, documenting the documentation! This will make it easier to set up an environment to see the documentation locally if need be, propose changes and raise queries in a transparency fashion so we can keep it the docs useful to people.
Streamlining Documentation Updates
Right now, our have a documentation site created using the static site generator eleventy, and a separate github repository for CO2.js, where the actual development takes place. We’ll be dedicating some time so that updates to the docs in the codebase are both visible on our documentation site and automatically updated, keeping them in sync.
We have a few other things we’d like to do, but these are ones we’re starting with. To learn more, you can read our public project document. You can also learn more about the other outstanding projects that are taking part in the 2024 Google Season of Docs on their website.
Frequently Asked Questions
We do not have a dedicated public communication platform for this project. Any communication we make about this project will happen across three channels – this blog, our LinkedIn page, and the Github repositories for CO2.js and the CO2.js documentation site.
At this time, we are planning to schedule some more staff time to help support new contributions to the docs. As we go through this planning process, we may decide to set aside some budget to hire a technical writer. If we do so, we will publish details of that on our LinkedIn page.
We will track work on this project through Github, and will create issues related to any items of work related to this project in the respective repositories. These issues will be tagged with a “gsod24” label indicating that they are related to the Google Season of Docs project.
If you have any questions that have not been answered here, then you can contact us via our support form.
Please note – we won’t be able to respond to unsolicited emails or direct messages to any individual members of our team.