What you’ll get out of it
In the Docs team, you’ll get a chance to practise your technical writing skills, and your communication skills (by liaising with the dev teams). You’ll also get to be one of the first people to hear about upcoming features in Three Rings, and try them out yourselves. Exciting!
Documentation is important – writing documentation opens up Three Rings to even more people, and makes how to use it clearer for more organisations. This might mean that some Samaritans branches, community libraries or Childline branches find out a new way to make their work more efficient!
In terms of practical benefit for you, we’re always happy to give references, to help you out with job applications, and we provide mentorship and guidance to help you get started.
Last but not least, you’ll get the chance to be a part of the wider Three Rings volunteer community! We have an active Slack group, where we have regular optional Sunday night slack socials. We also have an annual Christmas party (with +1 invitations), and we invite all volunteers to the annual AGM too.
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The DCamp is one of the highlights of my year. I love working with JTA, Head of Communications, and getting to see the cool things that the developers are building in real-time is really interesting. It means I get to explore and look at areas of Three Rings that I didn’t know existed, and make them usable to even more people by writing about them in a clear way.
What the role involves
We work with the Development team to write up what it is that they’ve worked on in the releases. These releases happen roughly every 3-4 months.
Towards the end of the release, the Docs team write up information on how the features work. This then gets sent out to testers, to help them with testing, and then goes to live with the rest of the documentation.
So, we ask that Docs volunteers spare a couple of hours before we go into beta testing, approximately 3 times a year. This involves looking through what the devs have done, chatting with them, and writing up documentation for it. We also invite Docs volunteers to the annual DCamp, which is where the bulk of the major Three Rings features get written for the year (although, this can be attended remotely!)
Support and training
All content goes through a peer review process, so you’ll have the chance to discuss all documentation you’ve written with someone else on the team. This is a great chance to get feedback on your writing.
We also have a style guide which we refer to to help out with some of the company language, which you’ll have access to, to help you out with the writing.
In case kit is an issue, we have a dedicated tech budget, so we can help you get any tech you need to volunteer with us. We also have a training budget, to help you get any training you might need too.
Lastly, we’re a friendly bunch who hang out on Slack with our own dedicated channel, so we’re always around for questions!
Want to join the Docs team?
We’d love to have you join us! Send us a message via our contact form, and we’ll get in touch with you within a day or two. We’ll then have a chat, and see where it takes us!