As you might know, due to recent events, the Nix documentation team is understaffed at the moment, with only @infinisil and @fricklerhandwerk remaining.
We are still fully committed towards improving official documentation in the Nix ecosystem and are therefore looking for new members to reach a team size of 4 to 6 people.
This team is the driving force behind making documentation in the Nix ecosystem more accessible, consistent, and complete.
To this end, we are looking for people to take ownership and make decisions to unblock further developments.
In particular, we need to fill the following roles:
- Team lead, responsible for
- Representing the team
- Setting a direction and agendas
- Keeping track of progress
- Administrative support, for tasks such as
- Scheduling meetings
- Taking and publishing notes
- Moderation and keeping to the schedule
-
Lead editors for
- Nixpkgs reference manual
- NixOS reference manual
- Tutorials and guides
- Technical maintainers, responsible for
- Maintenance of documentation infrastructure
- Choice of tooling
- Development of automation
It may sound scary, but if you’re curious, come to the meetings.
We’ll ease you into the process and figure out together what works best.
We also intend to provide opportunities for volunteer contributors and maintainers to take on narrow responsibilities that require less effort and continuity, and set up task-oriented working groups coordinated within the documentation team.
You are a good fit if you have…
- Strong motivation to improve the official documentation in the Nix ecosystem, specifically Nix, Nixpkgs, and NixOS
- Proficiency in written and oral communication in English, and good collaboration skills
- Capacity to regularly participate in team meetings and work on assigned tasks. We will try to find a time that fits everyone.
- Familiarity with the community and relevant technologies
These documents give a sense of what the team does:
Near-future goals
An overview of our mid-term goals, which we will continue refining as we go:
- Ease onboarding for users of Nix tools and contributors to their documentation:
- Improve discoverability of relevant documentation for major use cases
- Find dedicated owners for each part of the documentation
- Markdown everywhere
- Create a coherent vision for documentation in the Nix ecosystem, and derive an implementation strategy and roadmap, guided by the Diátaxis framework for technical documentation:
- Reference: Design an information architecture for reference documentation
- Tutorials: Draft a complete onboarding and learning journey
- Guides: Define a curation model for how-to guides
- Explanation: Devise a plan for developing a book on the intellectual history of the Nix ecosystem
Sponsorship
The Nix ecosystem is large, we have challenging problems to tackle, and doing what we do takes time and effort.
We don’t expect anyone to volunteer their time, and yet the reality is that the NixOS Foundation currently has no capacity to organise paid work or solicit the required funding – so far.
If the organisation you work for is willing to sponsor you participation on this team, it will be attributed on the team page.
If you are a decision-maker in an organisation that will benefit from improved documentation in the Nix ecosystem and if you want to materially support our efforts, please contact @fricklerhandwerk.
Get in touch
You can contact us over various channels:
- This Discourse thread
- Direct message on Discourse (@fricklerhandwerk, @infinisil) or Matrix (@fricklerhandwerk:matrix.org, @infinisil:matrix.org)
- Nix* Documentation on Matrix
- Participate in the team meetings
We’re looking forward to meet you!
This announcement was written by
@infinisil @fricklerhandwerk @sir4ur0n @yuki_is_bored @stefanschroeder @olaf @spacekookie