GSOD 2024 Application

[virgile-dev]

Google Season of Docs 2024 Application : Improve contributor's onboarding experience

What is uMap?

uMap is an uMap is AGPLv2-licenced project, that has been around for more than a decade, simplifying the creation of custom maps for our users.

It's using OpenStreetMap’s background layers and let you integrate them on your own website.

Multiple instances of uMap exist, and there is an overall count of more than one million maps around.

Users are maps enthusiasts from around the globe, who want to map some data and make it available for other people around them. The current documentation is available at https://docs.umap-project.org

the project has been maintained for a long time by only one person, and the team has gotten bigger in the recent years. We want to take this opportunity to ease the path to external contributions.

Problem

We don't receive a lot of contributions on uMap, and when we do, we most of the time fail to onboard them.

Getting started when working on uMap as a developer can be complicated. It's hard for external contributors to find their way in the project, and contribute features. Our guess is that it's due (among other things) to the lack of a high-level architecture introduction.

The project scope

This project will:

• Audit the existing documentation and create a friction log of the current documentation, for a new contributor that tries to make the project work on their machine, and try to understand the current codebase.
• Understand what are the missing areas in our documentation and gather information with the developers on how to fill this gap.
• Incorporate this new information in the existing documentation.

How would we measure success?

• New contributors: uMap has had 48 contributors to the date, we hope that GSOD will give uMap some extra visibility and motivate contributors to joins us. Last year we welcomed 10 contributors, 30% made more than 8 commits, we hope to double that figure in 2024.
• Contributors that contributed in the past are coming back: out of the 10 contributors we welcomed last year we hope that 50% of them we'll make another contribution this year.
• Increase in the number of external contributions: in the last 6 months 4% of PRs were made by external contributors, our hopes is increase it to 10%
• Documentation Feedback: we plan to solicit feedback from new contributors by sending out a survey about the documentation quality and usefulness. We especially want to know if the new and improved documentation helps new contributors take less to get started.

Project Deliverables

• Better information architecture on the currently existing documentation
• A better description of the high level architecture of uMap, and how it integrates with other GIS tools.
• Step by step guide on how to add a specific features to uMap, to use as exemples by developpers.

What skills would a technical writer need to work on this project?

• A good understanding of the Python and JavaScript tooling and communities.
• A familiarity with GIS softwares and concepts would be useful.
• Nice to have: A familiarity with the Leaflet ecosystem
• Nice to have: Experience with building getting started guides and onboarding of external communities.

Timeline

We expect this project to take over 2 months:

• May: Orientation and onboarding of the technical writer, Audit of the existing documentation.
• June: Create documentation
• July: Project completion

Budget

• $9 000.00 - Technical Writer audit, update, test and publish new documentation
• $250 to get some swag for the participants (10 T-shirts ~ 200$, 100 Stickers ~ 50$)

Mentors and support

Two maintainers @almet and @davidbgk have agreed to help on this project, and be main point of contacts. @virgile-dev a non technical contributor will also provide help in areas like project / product management.

Technical writers interested in working on this project should send an email to contact+docs@umap-project.org. Include links to your technical writing work or portfolio/résumé/CV.

[virgile-dev]

Our application was rejected. We are encouraged to try again next year.

Unfortunately, we weren't able to accept uMap into the 2024 Google Season of Docs program. 

You should have received an email to this effect yesterday; please check your spam folder if you haven't received it (it was sent to the addresses included as contact addresses in your application). 

Thank you again for your interest! We received very many excellent applications and the decisions this year were quite difficult. We encourage you to apply again in the future.