Open Docs, Open Collaboration: Building Better Documentation with Community PRs
summary
Public docs live in a GitHub repo of about 200 markdown files and receive roughly 30 to 50 PRs a month, with more than half from the community. Workflows use GitHub Actions, branch protection, code-owners, Cloudflare Pages previews, and linters like Vale and Alex; a components v2 doc drew ~60 review comments and triggered SDK PRs across 60 community libraries in 20+ languages. The team shifts toward generated reference docs to cut months‑old PR backlog and shorten time‑to‑merge.
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chapters (18)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:42Open docs to public contributions
- 2:47Open docs in practice
- 7:39Contributor guidelines party
- 11:30Tools for managing PRs
- 18:13Hard lessons on community PRs
- 23:30Automate while keeping human
- 24:54Active triage and feedback
- 27:21Building with developers
- 28:46Final thoughts
- 29:48Q&A
- 30:08Public roadmap
- 31:15PR value and engagement
- 32:39Competitor contributions
- 33:44Getting started with OSS
- 35:10Embargoed docs updates
- 36:34Preparing repo for open docs
- 37:38Docs to open for contributions
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39mBecome a Contributor to Microsoft Docs
57mOpen Source at commercial organisations
19mThe community wrote my docs!
38mSharing Knowledge: Writing Good Docs for Quick Approval
