Last week we open sourced all of GitHub’s product documentation, along with the Node.js web application that powers it. Check out our new public repository at github.com/github/docs.

This post tells the story of why we wanted to open source the docs, what tools we built and open sourced along the way, and how we worked to make the project welcoming to external contributors.

Why open source?

More people, more ideas, more fun

The open source community loves to innovate. Our docs team is innovative too, but we are relatively few in number. We open sourced docs.github.com to welcome new ideas and contributions from a broader and more diverse range of people, like you!

Exemplifying open source practices for enterprises

We open sourced GitHub’s product documentation to help demonstrate that it’s possible (and beneficial) for private companies to open source their products. GitHub has open sourced hundreds of projects over the years, but docs.github.com is the first private production service that we’ve migrated into the open. We hope that our application design, automation workflows, and openness to external contributions can be a model for other organizations that want to open up their private projects and benefit from community collaboration.

#community #open source #github