Google Season of Docs 2021 proposal

2021 Organization Application Form http://goo.gle/3qVxArQ
GitHub Milestone https://github.com/wechaty/summer-of-wechaty/milestone/4
Google 2021 Season of Docs Participants https://developers.google.com/season-of-docs/docs/participants

Create easy to learn tutorials for beginner users of Wechaty#

Wechaty (current version 0.56, first release in 2016) is an Apache-2.0 licensed Conversational RPA SDK for Chatbot Makers which can create a bot on almost all popluar popular IMs like WeChat, Whatsapp, WeCom, Gitter, and Lark etc, with a few lines of TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Go lang, Java, .NET, PHP lang, Scala, and Rust, with cross-platform compatibility including Linux, Windows, macOS, and Docker.

About Wechaty organization#

Most of our contributors come from Asia, and our users are conversational AI developers, machine learning researchers, freelancers who are building chatbot for their clients, and companies who are building commerical services on top of conversational automation, and top 1 scenario is building on top of WeChat/WeCom.

Our largest user is a company that helps enterprise scale their conversations on WeChat/WeWork by providing a Social CRM solution for their clients.

About Wechaty project#

The project’s problem#

Users come to Wechaty website seeking how to use Wechaty to build a chatbot application for solving their problems. Unfortunately, the learning curve is not friendly to our users, they always struggle with setting up with their development environment, can not get started with the simpliest example source code, and find it hard to know what they can do with our API. This problem leads to us losing lots of new users, increased number of questions asked in the community, and lowered user satisfication.

Our current version of the Tutorials is totally a messy structure because they were not planned properly to begin with.

We need to improve the tutorials on our website, the better it is, the happier our user will be!

The project’s scope#

Tutorials are lessons that take the reader by the hand through a series of steps to complete running Wechaty code. They are what our project needs in order to show a beginner that they can achieve something with it.

They are wholly learning-oriented, and specifically, they are oriented towards learning 'how' rather than learning 'what'.

Tutorials need to be useful for the beginner, easy to follow, meaningful, extremely robust, and kept up-to-dated.

The Tutorial project should:

Allow the user to learn by doing
Get the user started
Make sure that the tutorial works all the time
Ensure the user sees results immediately
Make the tutorial repeatable
Focus on concrete steps, not abstract concepts
Provide the minimum necessary explanation
Focus only on the steps the user needs to take
Work with the contributor team to update the documentation on the Wechaty site.

What is out-of-scope for this project#

This project is not an API reference, it can link to related pages for references.
This project is not for experienced users

We have two committer candidates for mentoring our GSoD project, and we estimate that this work will take three months to complete. The creator of Wechaty @huan (who is the core maintainer of the whole ecosystem) and @rui have committed to supporting the project.

Rui is mainly help the technical writers to:

get understand about the Documentation System: https://documentation.divio.com/
join the Wechaty community as soon as possible and understand all the tools our community is using.
get answered all the questions about Wechaty and the community.

Measuring your project’s success#

As of today, tutorials on our site receive 60% of pageviews of total traffic, the average visit duration is 1.5 min, the bounce rate is 70%.

We will track the above metrics (pageviews, visit duration, and bounce rate) monthly after the documentation is published. We will also track the number of user getting started questions, starting quarterly after the documentation is published.

We would consider the project successful if, after publication of the new documentation:

The tutorials pageviews increase by 50%
The visit duration on tutorials increases by 50% (>2 minutes)
The bounce rate of tutorials decreases by 30% (<50%)

Project budget#

Budget item	Amount	Running Total	Notes/justifications
Technical writer audit, update, test, and publish new documentation for primary project: tutorials	5000.00	5000.00
Technical writer audit, update, test, and publish new documentation for secondary projects	3000.00	8000.00
Volunteer stipends	500	9500.00	3 volunteer stipends x 500 each
TOTAL		9500.00

Ref: proposal template

Projects#

Tutorials ($5k)
How-to Guides ($1k)
Reconstruct Wechaty landing page with value propositions, @huan, May 01, 2021 ($1k)
References ($1k)
Introduction ($1k)
Landing page ($1k)
gRPC & OpenAPI ($1k)

The excess of the budget will be subsidized by the community.

Wechaty GSoD'21 blogs#

Contact us#

If you are a Technical Writer and you are interested to contribute in wechaty project for Google Season of Docs 2021, Please send your proposal (by following the template of writing the statement of interest from Google) to our mail list at wechaty@googlegroups.com (web archive), and then introduce yourself after joining our Wechaty Gitter.im channel for connecting.