Setting up the Tools for Contributing to OpenStack Documentation
For non-programmers, making a meaningful contribution to an open source project can be difficult; this is as true for OpenStack as for other open source projects. Documentation is a way to contribute, but in the case of OpenStack there is a non-trivial setup required in order to be able to contribute to the OpenStack documentation. In this post, I’m going to share how to set up the tools to contribute to OpenStack documentation in the hopes that it will help others get past the “barrier to entry” that currently exists.
I’ve long wanted to be more involved in supporting the OpenStack community, beyond my unofficial support via advocacy and blogging about OpenStack. I felt that documentation might be a way to achieve that goal. After all, I’ve written books and have been blogging for 9 years, so I should be able to add some value via documentation contributions. However, the toolchain that the OpenStack documentation uses requires a certain level of familiarity with development-focused tools, and the “how to” guides were less than ideal because of assumptions made regarding the knowledge level of new contributors. For these reasons, I felt that sharing how I (a non-programmer) set up the tools Continue reading