Building bridges to customer needs in open source documentation

Abstract

The Red Hat OpenShift documentation repository is situated in a unique open source environment in which anybody with a GitHub account can contribute directly to the documentation set. One of the primary contributors to the documentation repository are developers, which presents a challenge. The technical writers on the Red Hat OpenShift documentation team who collaboratively write, edit, and merge these contributions are faced with the challenge of maintaining user-centered rather than engineering- centered documentation. Furthermore, the technical writers lack direct interaction with external customers. Considering these challenges, this industry insight report discusses several methods that can be employed to maintain a customer-centric focus and improve the documentation set: focus on user stories, network with internal customers and stakeholders who work closest with external customers, and seek opportunities to work on customer cases.