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Comment by spats1990 | Hacker News Reader

spats1990

offtopic-ish but maybe somebody sees it: can anyone recommend places around the web to look for open source projects where I can help out as a writer? I write and edit professionally but am bad at code beyond some 101-level Java, and beyond that the usual html/css. I've always appreciated well-written help docs, manuals, FAQs, etc of any kind and would like to help out if I can and hopefully learn some things while doing so, even if it's just low-level stuff like proofreading. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

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I've seen several sites that list open source projects looking for help (see e.g. [1]), but I'm not aware of any focusing specifically on documentation.

My advice would be to look at the documentation for projects that you use or like. The state of documentation in open source projects overall is not great, so probably you can find a project that could use some help. It might take a while to develop a good working relationship with the developers, but once they realize you're a good writer and serious about helping hopefully they'll give you enthusiastic support.

[1] https://www.firsttimersonly.com/

Thank you for the link and good general advice. I've been using linux on and off for a while (these days just mint/tina) for a while so I'll try to work out if/how I can help in that sphere.

I'm a writer who has asked similar questions in the past. I don't recall finding any slam dunk "This is how writers get involved!" solutions.

I have had some luck with suggesting better wording for projects submitted via Show HN. Some of that has been adopted and I've been sincerely thanked a few times. I've documented a little of that as part of a kind of portfolio.

I haven't tried super hard to pursue this. If you want to get involved in earnest, you need a little luck (plus some quiet, patient persistence). You should look for situations with an extensive need for writing help plus good personal rapport between you and one or more key people.

That's basically how you get involved in something when they aren't really looking for you. You identify a need you can meet, then try to establish those personal connections that aren't overly personal, but are personable enough where you can have good and useful conversations about stuff not currently on their radar without them giving you the cold shoulder because they see you as a waste of time.

Thank you for the solid advice. That was basically how I got into writing/editing as a field originally so it's good to know similar principles might apply here. An upside is that tech/engineering people (especially those involved with OSS) seem generally pretty friendly and willing to explain stuff, etc--provided that, as you said, they don't feel their time is being wasted.

The "selling" part here is convincing people that writing really matters. And you need to do it in a way that comes across as "You have a cool thing that is doing good stuff and I would like to make it betterer." You need to not make people feel insulted, which can be tricky.

I think that's the biggest thing I wrestle with is convincing people I have something of value to offer without sounding like "You suck!" It's really tricky when it's knowledge work.

The other thing about writing technical documentation is you have to understand the tech some to talk about it. I occasionally do resume work and I mostly do that for experienced tech people who probably know me through HN in most cases. I can edit their resumes even though I'm not a serious programmer because I have some idea what the hell they do for a living.

This is a really big thing for the tech world. Communicating well means you first need to understand the topic and the tech world routinely beats its head against a wall because managers and salespeople and so forth don't actually understand the tech well enough to be genuinely effective. It leads to lots of "They did this stupid thing because they honestly have no idea what the tech actually does."

This seems to be a factor in some of the debacles where some startup company has stuck "AI" in the name, absolutely can't deliver on that promise and they are getting sued because of it.

A lot of "tech" solutions are like that scene in Men in Black 2 where they open the mail sorting machine and inside is a guy with many arms flinging mail as fast as he can.

Many non-technical people honestly don't know the difference between a box of people and an actual machine-based solution. If you are crowd sourcing work from many remote workers and getting results on a website, they just see the website and go "Well, neat! Computers are amazing!"

So be prepared for writing technical documentation to be hard at first and involve a lot of research. But if you get good at it, you might find that people will seek you out because a lot of writers simply aren't qualified to communicate on the subject. They don't have the background knowledge.

We need proofreaders at Standard Ebooks! You could even produce a book if you'd like, as the skills needed are basic command line familiarity, and HTML/CSS. Regex is very helpful but not required. https://standardebooks.org

Damn, that is an awesome idea and right up my alley. Will be reaching out in the next week or two. Thanks.

At FreeSewing, we would welcome you with open arms: https://github.com/freesewing/

Documentation is one of the most important things for the well-being of a project. Your contributions would be extremely valuable. So if you think what we do is worthwhile, please get in touch.

Full disclosure: I am the maintainer

Cool project. I'm going to dig into this and let you know if I see any areas where I might be of help.

Awesome :)

We would also welcome you with open arms at https://github.com/saulpw/visidata =) Send us an email, or join us on freenode, twitter, etc, if you want to help out! I would love to onboard you.

Thank you for the reply! As I said to someone else, I'll dig into this first, then reach out if I see some area where I could potentially help out. (I wasn't expecting to get so many replies to my original comment here.)

This is a similar issue for designers. Lots of open source projects desperately need UX help (or could at least benefit from a nicer website) but very few of them extend any kind of welcome to the people that could help.

In my experience, technical writing is at least as hard as programming. The last project I published as OSS, the writing was easily half the effort.

So don't short-sell yourself. :)

funny: I read my own spec after 6 months and it struck me as the worse technical writing I had ever seen. Maybe you can take a swing at it. http://go-here.nl/ess-and-nno

I think you write very well, but I can take a swing at some minor stuff. I'll email you with suggestions/revisions when I get round to it. That's "when" not "if"--I will do it, and within 1-3 weeks, but I'm trying to finish a novel (not getting paid for it though! sounds of universe cackling in derision)

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