Can you open source documentation?

Just over 10 years ago, the SendGrid team did something pretty cool.

Spearheaded by Developer Evangelist Brandon West, we open-sourced the SendGrid docs:

On the surface, it may seem simple: create a public GitHub repo, copy-paste your docs into it, and give it an open-source license.

The effort to build and publish from that repo to the SendGrid site was a heavier lift.

But most importantly, it sent a message to developers: your feedback is important to us.

Devs who used SendGrid could open documentation issues right from GitHub, where they do the rest of their work.

Or, they could take it a step further, and make the edits themselves. Just like code, it would be reviewed by someone on our SendGrid team. If it looked good, we’d push it to production.

These days, this sort of developer feedback is much more common.

When the EveryDeveloper team looked at 30 top developer company docs, we found almost half (43%) allow visitors to directly suggest edits to the documentation, usually via GitHub.

GitLab uses its own service (naturally) but includes a rich “help and feedback” module on every page of its documentation.

It ensures their already-great docs can continue to improve.

If you want to get serious about serving developers, reach out to our team for help.