Good engineering documentation not only drives adoption (48% of businesses say that documentation was the deciding factor in choosing to adopt an open source technology) and supports developers; it's also critical to supporting community contributors. Clear documentation of a project's processes, such as contributor guides and codes of conduct, are especially valued by under-represented groups and are vital to building inclusive communities. But in practice, 93% of OSS devs complain about the lack of good, reliable documentation, making it the #1 problem they face when working with open source software.

How can we fix this? In Q1 2019, Google's Open Source Strategy team commissioned a user research study to better understand why users do (or do not) contribute back to the project, and how documentation can help remove roadblocks to that project's adoption and usage - and encourage and enable community contributions.

In this talk, we'll cover the methodology and participant profiles of the study, and describe the three essential user personas we identified - along with their critical user journeys. And we'll also distill the research to provide concrete recommendations and best practices for creating documentation that helps your community flourish.