Open Source Summit North America 2025

It’s product release time. The code is stable. You’ve got everything EXCEPT the docs.

How do you create meaningful, prioritized content in a short time frame?

Your writer needs to collaborate with a Subject Matter Expert (SME) who understands the technical and user content. At Grafana, this synergy happens between Field Engineers (FE) and Technical Writers (TW). FEs are a three-in-one SME with the understanding of a developer, sales engineer, and technical support.

How does this collaboration benefit both writers and SMEs?
* TW has a single SME for user needs and cross-product technical expertise.
* FEs get accurate, up-to-date content that helps them and Grafana’s OSS community members get up to speed on products.
* OSS Community members get accurate, up-to-date docs.

In this session, you’ll learn how to:
* Identify the right SME
* Establish a collaborative workflow
* Prioritize work that best addresses the user’s needs

We’ll detail how this collaboration started through a shared love of RPGs, the traps we encountered and lessons learnt, and how a bi-weekly session between two colleagues became the foundation for a model now used across Grafana’s telemetry products.

Documentation thrives on contributions, but many potential contributors hesitate to edit docs because of uncertainty about style, structure, and quality standards. This talk demonstrates how modern tooling can create a supportive environment that empowers non-writers to confidently contribute to documentation. We'll explore a practical toolkit combining templates for clear structure, AI-powered drafting assistance, automated style checking, format linting, content validation, and quality reviews to guide contributors through the docs process. Through these tools and a streamlined editing workflow, teams can create an environment where developers, product managers, support staff, and other non-writers feel confident contributing while maintaining documentation standards. We'll examine real examples of successful implementations and provide practical steps for adding these capabilities to your own docs.

In an era when transparency is often a corporate buzzword, few companies truly embrace it at scale. What happens when a company commits to making nearly all of its internal documentation open source? What are the benefits, risks, and unexpected cultural shifts that arise?

In this session, we’ll take a deep dive into our company’s journey of open-sourcing nearly all documentation—from GitHub issues and design review notes to sprint demos and research documents. We’ll explore the motivations behind this decision, the technical and cultural challenges we faced, and the impact on our customers, employees, and open-source contributors.

Join us as we dissect the practical realities of radical transparency in engineering and product development. Whether you’re considering a similar approach or simply want to understand how transparency at scale affects innovation, security, and collaboration, this session will provide invaluable lessons and strategies.

As part of a broader effort to document the architecture and design of the Linux Kernel, we propose a method to formally describe low level developer intent in the form of testable expectations (i.e. requirements). This will provide a fact based foundation for pass/fail test development, test validation via code coverage tools, support optional traceability to higher level design, and enable tool development for process automation.

This talk is a continuation of the proposal for Linux Kernel Requirements that formally originated at the 2024 Linux Plumbers Safe Systems with Linux Mini-conference, and further updated at the December 2024 ELISA Workshop at Goddard Space Center.

This edition will present the current state of the requirement template design, provide examples of Linux kernel source code instrumented with low level requirements, present technical explanations for template design decisions, and provide an opportunity for feedback from the developer community.

When documentation becomes outdated, projects lose contributors, support burdens increase, and adoption slows. Yet, many open-source projects struggle with maintaining accurate docs as the codebase evolves.

This session presents five proven strategies to turn documentation from a pain point into a sustainable asset:

Integrate Docs into Development: Treat docs like code, updating them alongside new features through PR workflows and docs-driven development.

Establish Governance: Assign documentation ownership with roles like a rotating "Docs Steward" and regular audits to maintain quality.

Master Versioning: Align docs with software releases, automating updates for deprecated features or breaking changes

Leverage Automation: Use tools to validate content, detect outdated material, and auto-generate sections like API docs

Build a Documentation Culture: Create a contributor-friendly environment with templates, recognition, and clear entry points for first-time contributors

Instead of theory, you'll get adaptable frameworks and real-world examples that work across any tech stack. Leave with actionable workflows that make documentation maintenance less painful and more impactful.