Contribute to our docs

We are committed to continuously improving our documentation and making it more useful for both ourselves and others.

We warmly welcome community contributions, suggestions, fixes, and constructive feedback.

To contribute, go ahead and submit an issue or pull request at https://github.com/canonical/launchpad-manual.

If you have any questions or doubts, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us by any of these means:

Style and language

Launchpad’s documentation is aimed at helping both beginners and experts. As such, we try to use appropriate writing for the subject, to use inclusive language, and to assume that the reader has as little prior knowledge as possible.

The navigation, structure, style, and content of our documentation follows the Diátaxis systematic framework for technical documentation authoring. This splits pages into tutorials, how-to guides, reference material, and explanatory text.

Some general tips that could help to ensure high quality documentation:

  • use a spell checker

  • resist being overly formal

  • resist being overly verbose

  • verify links and examples

We recommend using the Ubuntu style guide.

Feel free to suggest changes to any documentation topic with updated or more insightful information. We aim for consistency, but don’t let formality prevent you from contributing. If something is inconsistent, we’ll fix it. We’d rather have documentation that we can fix than not have documentation at all.

Open Documentation Academy

Launchpad is a proud member of the Canonical Open Documentation Academy (CODA).

The Open Documentation Academy is an initiative that aims to encourage open source contributions from the community by making documentation the gateway, thus lowering the barrier to entry.

Through the academy, community members get access to curated and well-defined beginner-friendly tasks along with mentorship and advice in a friendly and encouraging environment. This allows them to make meaningful contributions to established open-source projects, such as Launchpad, from the start.

For experts, the academy can be a great place to share knowledge and get involved with new developments.

For more information on how you can get involved, visit the CODA website. You can also browse through the types of issues you’ll be working on in the CODA repository.

Other channels to get involved with the academy include:

  • The CODA discussion forum on the Ubuntu Community Hub

  • The Matrix channel #documentation:ubuntu.com for interactive chat

You can also follow Canonical’s documentation team on Fosstodon for the latest updates and information on upcoming events.