| Program announcement | January 18, 2023 Season of Docs program announced |
| Organization applications | February 15, 2023 at 18:00 UTC Organizations can begin submitting applications to Google |
| March 24, 2023 at 18:00 UTC Deadline for organization applications | |
| March 24 - March 30, 2023 Google program administrators review organization applications | |
| Organizations announced | March 31, 2023 at 18:00 UTC Google publishes the list of accepted organizations |
| Doc development | March 31, 2023 Doc development can officially begin |
| Technical writer hiring | May 10, 2023 Technical writer hiring deadline |
| Technical Writing | March 31, 2023 - November 13, 2023 Hired technical writers work on documentation projects with guidance from organizations |
| Monthly Evaluations | Organization administrators begin to submit monthly evaluations to report on the status of their project |
| Final project evaluation and case study | November 6 - November 21, 2023 at 18:00 UTC Organization administrators submit their case study and final project evaluation |
| Results announced | December 5, 2023 Google publishes the 2021 Season of Docs case studies and aggregate project data |
| Followup surveys | May 1, 2024 Organizations begin to participate in post-program followup surveys |
| Info | ||
|---|---|---|
| ||
Mifos is applying for participation in Season of Docs once again. Check back in on March 31, 2023 to see if we have been accepted. |
...
...
Based on learnings from our previous Season of Docs participation and the progress made in 2021 with documentation consolidation and the progress made in 2022 around technical documentation for the revamped Fineract and Mifos releases, our 2023 Season of Docs will focus on documentation to improve the Developer Experience for all contributors to and innovators of our project.
...
- New Contributors - volunteers, interns, or anyone new to the project seeking how they can contribute to the the various solutions we have around core banking, mobile wallets, payment orchestration, G2P payments, etc.
- Developers Developer Training - as financial institutions, integrators, governments, fintechs or any consumers of our software, start to use our
- New Partner Onboarding - Local system integrators and partners deploying, localizatin, hosting, and supporting solutions powered by our open source projects need to self-equip themselves with the requisite knowledge and need better orientation in doing this a technical level.
- Fintech Innovators - Fintechs of all sizes need to be able to imagine and bring to life the many different DFS and fintech solutions that can be powered by our building blocks and require a smooth developer experience and sandbox environment to do so.
- Customers - For the IT staff of public and private sector customer evaluating our solutions and DPGs, they need a smooth and optimal experience to test out and experience our software. Evaluating the syste
For all of these technical stakeholders, we want to provide the smoothest developer experiences so they can:
...
To overcome some of the challenges we faced in previous Season of Docs programs requiring heavy subject matter expert or developer participation to equipethe equip the technical writers with the proper functional domain or technical knowledge, the focus of this year's proposal will be more around the developer experience - from setup and installation, to collaboration and communication norms with the community, contributions standards and processes, and how to extending and building solutions using our APIs, and deploying these solutions in the cloud. This focus will reduce dependencies on our community around technical and domain knowledge yet require technical writers who have a strong technical background, including those with previous experiences as a software developer.
Contribution Guide
- Reference an example
Installation & Setup
- Across each of the apps
Deployment in the Cloud
Contribution Experience
...
...
Developer Orientation (6 days)
This task would center around compiling and updating existing documentation and writing some new pages to orient developers on the solutions avialable and descriptions of the overall architecture and data model and repository structure for foundational projects like Fineract and Payment Hub-EE.
- Overview of the various solutions, projects, and repositories and building block components we provide and how they interact with each other to provide foundation for various financial inclusion, banking, fintech or G2P solutions. (2 days)
- Understand data model & architecture (2 days)
- Overview of PH-EE microservices and what does what. (2 days)
Contribution Guide (3 days)
This task focuses on creation of a simple yet comprehensive getting started guide for new contributors and ensuring that each of the introductory pages for each of our solutions follows the common standard format for our developer documentation.
- Create New Contributor guide to help new contributors quickly get started and identify tasks they can work on. A great example is https://code.publiclab.org/ (1 days)
- Update Developer Landing Pages for each Project Solution - contributing guidelines, project setup guide, troubleshooting tips, architectural description/overview, release notes/history. (2m days)
Installation & Setup (8 days)
This task area centers around ensuring developers can get a local development environment setup and configured as well as the ability to install and run production environment of our core solutions.
Developer Environment Setup - Improve, update and streamine the following developer guides:
- Developer Environment setup for Mifos X & Fineract ( 1 day)
- Developer Environment setup for Web App (1 day)
- Developer Environment Setup for Mobile Apps (1 day)
- Developer Environment Setup for Payment Hub EE ( 2 days)
Production Environment Installation - Improve, update, and streamline the installation guides for the following:
- Production Environment for Mifos X & Fineract on Linux including upgrade process and applying database migrations (2 day)
- Production Enviornment for Payment Hub EE (1 day)
Deployment in the Cloud (6 days)
We have a wealth of tooling avialable to enable the deployment of our solutions in containerized environments in the public cloud which is not very well-documented.
- Public Cloud Availability - Describe our strategy around public clouds and the availabilitiy of images for each public cloud provider like Azure, AWS, and GCP (1 day)
- Update and refine documentation to ongoing DevOps tooling improvements for deployment of the platform and Payment Hub EE including Terraform scripts, Configurable Helm Charts, Kubernetes, Docker Files and Containerization Optimations
- Describe the resources available for Mifos X & Fineract (Helm Charts, Docker Compose files, Terraform Scripts) (1 day)
- Describe the resources available for Payment Hub EE (Helm Charts, Docker Compose files, Terraform Scripts) (1 day)
- Helm Charts & Docker Compose
- Instruction guide & tutorial on how to deploy using the above resources for containerization and infrastructure as code r
- Mifos X & Fineract (1.5 days)
- Payment Hub EE (1.5 days)
Collaboration & Contribution Experience (
We need to ensure that contributors are oriented on our processes and best practices on not just contributin but contributing in an upstream fashion
- Process Overview - describe and outline the process and flow for the following core community procedures:
- Reporting Bugs(.5)
- Requesting New Features (.5)
- Designing New Features & Major Improvements (.5)
- Submittting Pull Request - tutorial, guidelines, and best practices (.5)
- Release Strategy - overview of our strategy for relases - LTS release, point releases/hot fixes for security updates including release management process (code freeze, voting, etc. process and(.5 days)
- Contribution Guidelines - overview of our contribution guidelines and coding standards, best practices to be followed (1 day)
- Code Quality & Statutic Analysis - Draft documentation related to automated code checks, static analysis, and other build-level automation that has been introduced to improve code quality and reduce friction of upstream contribution (1.5 days)
- Update documentation on upstream contribution process and ensuring that contributors know how to properly configure Github to sync their downstream codebase with upstream project and do development in an upstream-first manner that is aligned with Apache Way (2 man-days)
- Coding Standards & Tools (1)
Testing Process
Using our Developer/Innovator Toolkit (12 days)
- Integrating with other Systems (2 days)
- Connecting Channel Applications Securely (2 days)
- Extending the system via Customer Modules (2 days)
- Building new via the API (2 days
- Building Solutiosn using our SDK
API Docs
- (2 days)
API Docs
- clean up and organizat in readme.io portal
Building from the API
Using Custom Modules
For Season of Docs, where I think we could use a technical writer is to help with more of our documentation around developer experience - getting environment setup, installation guides, deployability and DevOps tools, what SDKs we have and how to interact, how to use the API, custom modules, contribution process, coding standards, upstream development, etc.So moreso helping to onboard new contributors/developers - could be volunteers, could be staff, could be partners, could be fintechs implementing.I
contributing to the project, required The focus of our documentation leveraging this existing documentation as foundational componen This project will build off of the 2021 Season of Docs project which consolidated our documentation into one unified portal with separate spaces for developer and user documentation.
...
- Refine documentation on the enhanced ability to separate read/write API operations for greater performance (1 day)
- Refine documentation for migration of database from MySQL to PostgreSQL including the migration from Flyway to Liquibase for database migration scripts (1.5 days)
- Refine documentation for tuning and indexing to optimize performance based on PostgreSQL and Eclipselink enhancements. (1 day)
- Write new documentation on transaction idempotency and business and effective date configuration (1 day)
- Refine documentation on new reliable event handling framework built on Kafka (2.5 days)
- Refine documentation on integration of Spring Batch for parallelization of batch jobs, running smaller chunks of batch jobs, ensuring no transaction conflict between real-time and batch processes including architecture of new framework, how to configure and schedule jobs, etc. (3 days)
...
Functional & Deployment Documentation (12 person days)
...
Documentation (12 person days)
- Update and refine documentation to reflect new DevOps tooling for deployment of the platform and Payment Hub EE including Terraform scripts, Configurable Helm Charts, Kubernetes and Containerization Optimations Draft new documentation outlining functionality of payment hub, each of its new modules, and use cases it supports (3 days)
- Update critical documentation that is outdated or not clear including installation guide, reporting, SMS gateway configuration, and self-service user creation. Draft new documentation on how to install, deploy and configure Payment Hub EE (2 days)
...
- Update documentation and screenshots in user manual to reflect design of new web app (2 days)
- Draft Update and refine documentation related to automated code checks, static analysis, and other build-level automation that has been introduced to improve code quality and reduce friction of upstream contribution (1 day) Update documentation on upstream contribution process and ensuring that contributors know how to properly configure Github to sync their downstream codebase with upstream project and do development in an upstream-first manner that is aligned with Apache Way (2 man-to reflect new DevOps tooling for deployment of the platform and Payment Hub EE including Terraform scripts, Configurable Helm Charts, Kubernetes and Containerization Optimations (3 days)
- Update critical documentation that is outdated or not clear including installation guide, reporting, SMS gateway configuration, and self-service user creation. (2 days)
Collaboration Documentation (7 person days)
- Draft documentation for QA/testers on how to write new tests and leverage the Cucumber Test framework (2 man-days)
- Draft documentation for developers on how to write code leveraging new Cucumber test framework for unit testing (1 man-day)
- Update FAQs explaining difference between Mifos and Fineract. (1 day)
...
We would consider the project successful if, after updating documentation to support the launch of Mifos X 3.0:
- Number of pull requests and upstream contributions increase by 20%
- Number of onboarded new active contributors increase by 10 over a 3 month period.
- Number of partners making contributions upstream increases by at least 5 additional partners.
- Number of questions on mailing list regarding to how deploy or configure the platform goes down by 20%
...
Total project budget is $15,000 USD
...
Amount
(USD)
...
Running Total
(USD)
...
Additional Information
...
to improve the developer experience, we can start to see the following progress on metrics:
- Number of pull requests and upstream contributions increase by 20%
- Number of onboarded new active contributors increase by 10 over a 3 month period.
- Number of partners making contributions upstream increases by at least 5 additional partners.
- Number of questions on mailing list regarding to how deploy or configure the platform goes down by 20%
Anchor budget budget
Project Budget
| budget | |
| budget |
Total project budget is $15,000 USD
| Item | Amount (USD) | Running Total (USD) | Notes/Justification |
|---|---|---|---|
| Technical Writer | $12,000 | $12,000 | |
| Graphic design - flow diagrams, charts and visuals to accompany documentation | $750 | $12,750 | |
| Project Management, Supervision, and Review of Deliverables | $1,500 | $14,250 | To cover partial cost of scoping out project, managing its delivery and final review of deliverables. |
| Volunteer Stipends (2 at $300 each) | $600 | $14,850 | For volunteers that will be closely providing information and/or reviewing deliverables |
| T-Shirts/SWAG for Volunteers | $150 | $15,000 | Printing of t-shirts or stickers for documentation volunteers |
Additional Information
Previous experience with technical writers
Our 2022 Season of Docs was informed by our learnings from 2021 but even though we worked with a more senior technical writer, due to the domain-specific nature of our project (banking and financial services) and the high degree or technical complexity of the project scope (enterprise architectural changes), our project required a high amount of time from our developers and subject matter experts so our aim for 2023 is to structure a project where the technical writer can operate more independently with less dependency upon knowledge transfer from experienced individuals.
We successfully completed the 2021 Season of Docs program which helped impart upon us many critical lessons in scoping of the project, onboarding of the technical writer, managing expectations of the project, and ensuring the technical writer had optimal access to subject matter experts for proper facilitation. We have developed a strong understanding of the ideal types of documentation to focus on for a Season of Docs project and the ideal skillset in terms of domain and technical expertise needed to successfully complete a project.
...