A journey to Simple Community Documentation

This is intended for audiences who have a project, process or idea and know how that works, and wish to share that knowledge with their users and the world

The general state of documentation for many projects and processes isn't very good - most are non-existent, some exist but are locked to company or project discord servers and many have accessibility issues.

This will be an open talk on how we can make human-friendly documentation, and what attendees can do to make their big and small projects easier to use. We will discuss various documentation ideas, wiki tools, and other forms of documentation: This ranges from wikis to videos and even README.md files, every small effort counts!

Many of the tools used here are versatile - they can be used to automate any non-technical process as well, and give well formatted step-by-step instructions or guidance to the community.

I personally prefer a static-site-generator called "Vitepress" that takes simple human-readable Markdown and converts it into a usable wiki for your projects without needing any programming knowledge. Link: https://vitepress.dev/

Working Examples that I was involved in/contributed to:

• FOSSonTop, made with Vitepress: https://fosson.top
• A documentation project that tries to make the process of using Crave.io for building Android ROMs well documented, and easy to follow
• Also has sections on normal AOSP compilation
• ExamDawn, made with Vitepress: https://examdawn.pages.dev
• A voluntary student website to easily organize college content, answers to important questions, Digital Lab Manuals, etc.
• Even features runnable examples for python!
• NIOS-Students, made with Vitepress: https://nios-students.pages.dev
• A simple docs maintained by the content leads "Kotaro hates you!" and "Aqueel Ur" and the community to answer questions and doubts from NIOS Students from start to end of the process
• Linux AppImages for Pixelpulse2 Website, made with Vitepress: https://sounddrill31.github.io/Pixelpulse2/
• Quick website to document installation steps to set up my AppImage for Pixelpulse2

Documentation is important! Every little bit of information is useful to the end user

• This documentation should be 3AM-friendly, as the user might be at the end of their wits
• Overloading the user with overly technical information doesn't help as much
• There are situations where there is no meaningful amount of documentation available, or it's locked behind a meaningless barrier like a reddit, discord or telegram account
• It is actually trivial to spin up good docs, especially by using Markdown and wiki software
• A video guide may go a long way for more mainstream audiences!