A working group consists of two or more templateers who are collaborating together to work on a Good Docs Project initiative or focus area of the project. Working groups can be organized on a temporary, ad-hoc basis or can exist as a long-term, permanent basis as long as there is sufficient interest to maintain them.
All working groups are open for anyone to join as a general rule. Contributors can belong to as many working groups as they have time for and it’s okay to join a group to observe for a while before contributing. If you are interested in contributing to a working group, join their Slack channel to ask how you can get involved.
For a list of the current active working groups, see Good Docs Project Working Groups.
Anyone can create a working group for an initiative or focus area that you’re passionate about. To start a group, you need at least two Good Docs Project community members who are interested in collaborating together. (Otherwise, it’s also fine to work independently on an initiative.)
To create a working group:
- Create a Slack channel for your group, then in the list of members of your channel, you can right click each person to copy the link to use for them in the 'members' frontmatter list.
- Pick someone in your group to be the point of contact
- Decide on regular meeting cadence (weekly? bi-weekly? monthly?)
- Consider making a few general announcements to recruit other people toward your group on the #general Slack channel or on the main groups.io mailing list
- Open a pull request on our website repo in the
content > en > working-groupfolder and use the following template:
---
title: Working Group Name
poc: "[WG Captain Name](https://thegooddocs.slack.com/team/Slack-Profile-ID)"
meeting: Your group's meeting cadence
status: Active
description: Short summary of the Group's objectives/goals, this will be shown on both the list and detail page.
slackName: your-Slack-channel-name
slackID: your-channel-ID (you can get this ID by right clicking the channel name, 'Copy link', and find the id value at the end of that URL.)
notesURL: http://example.com (link to your Google Doc for meeting notes)
members:
- "[Group member name](https://thegooddocs.slack.com/team/your-Slack-Profile-ID)"
- "[Group member name](https://thegooddocs.slack.com/team/your-Slack-Profile-ID)"
- "[Group member name](https://thegooddocs.slack.com/team/your-Slack-Profile-ID)"
draft: false
---
Put your elevator pitch here and a more detailed mission statement!
Talk about who should join your group!
Over time, this will be a good place to enter notes about the progress your group is making toward their objectives.
In order to be considered an active working group, your working group should strive to keep its responsibilities. Working group responsibilities include:
- Holding meetings and recording meeting notes
- The group should provide their group status, updated at least monthly. Adding notes to the Working Group page content is a great location for this information. Ideally this will be presented by one or more of its members to one of the two weekly Good Docs Project meetings. If attendance at the meeting is not possible, please provide your group status in the #general Slack channel or on the groups.io mailing list.
- All working group members should follow the Good Docs Code of Conduct when working together.
- The group members should try to keep any commitments that they make to the working group.
- Maintain at least two active contributing group members.
- Keep membership in the group open and allow new community members to join.
If your working group is no longer active or has achieved its objectives, you can dissolve the working group. To dissolve the working group, give a 2 week notice to your group members and to the general Good Docs membership on the #general Slack channel and/or on the groups.io mailing list.
After two weeks, remove your group from the web page. Archiving the working group Slack channel is optional.