TL;DR I am proposing improvements to documentation and content of the Apache Beam website to facilitate adoption and growth of its community [4].
Hi everyone, I have been talking and brainstorming with a few Beam users, developers, and contributors to figure out more ways to help increase Beam’s adoption, and grow a healthy and inclusive community. Based on those conversations, I have come up with the following ideas: First, is to enable internationalization and localization of the Apache Beam website to increase the reach of the project. We can do this by migrating the current website from Jekyll do Docsy [2]. Docsy supports internationalization out-of-the-box. Other projects have been very successful enabling platforms that allow their users to contribute a translation of the documentation and make the project accessible to non-english speakers. Examples are Kubernetes, Tensorflow and Apache Airflow. Second, is to work on the content of the website to make the user onboarding experience easier. This includes updating tutorials and quickstarts, deprecating outdated or irrelevant sets of documentation, and creating new documentation that is currently lacking. From the conversations with both new and experienced users, it is clear that there are a number of new features (Schemas, State and Timers, new Python IOs, etc) that are not documented. Documentation for existing features can also be improved. We also plan to add new pages with useful knowledge about Beam (its Ecosystem, past workshops, talks and upcoming meetups) that will provide Beam users additional support in their journey towards adoption. Third, rework the knowledge architecture to be more intuitive and improve website functionality for better and faster user onboarding. Include relevant links in the Apache Beam docs to additional contributor resources on Beam Cwiki to make new contributor experience better. More detailed action plan and estimated timeline is described in this document [4]. It is still a work in progress, but feel free to leave your feedback in the comments, as well as in this thread. Thanks, Aizhamal [1] https://beam.apache.org/ [2] https://github.com/google/docsy [3] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/BEAM/Apache+Beam [4] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HlRHfmc9MvKkFEf2gfIL3RYVxTmBXQL4sXjAGGOjeiI/edit#heading=h.5rqdbnson7px
