Open Documentation Initiative Discussions
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Do you like GitHub as documentation feedback channel?

je-hal
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert

GitHub is a powerful collaboration platform where open source projects thrive. The Open Documentation Initiative takes advantage of this strength for SAP standard documentation. By doing this, you can be sure that your feedback is not only heard, it's also replied to so that the responsible author can understand better what's wrong with the documentation. 

Nevertheless, you may not like the approach, or cannot use it for other reasons. I'd like to invite you to this discussion to get a better idea why. What is it that you don't like? Is there anything we can improve? Looking forward to your answers.

5 REPLIES 5

martinstenzig
Contributor

I personally like GitHub as a collaboration platform and engine to drive the adjustments. Keeps it clean and does not hide anything. I can see people without prior GitHub experience needing a "walk through" to get comfortable with before they can submit documentation adjustments. If the question were: "if you have 3$, how would you allocate it, I would say, let's put all 3 in further rolling out the ODI to all SAP products first" before we make the user simpler. 

je-hal
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

Thank you @martinstenzig for your feedback. 
GitHub already provides information about pull requests, reviews, and so on. For example, I like https://skills.github.com very much to try out GitHub hands-on. Since our main target group is developers, I had the hope that most of them are familiar with GitHub anyway, but maybe that's not always the case.

We invest most of our time to onboard new guides to the Open Documentation Initiative, but I don't think we will ever onboard all guides. For example, I wouldn't expect end-users to be willing to provide feedback through GitHub.

rcaziraghi
Participant

I think that GitHub is an excellent feedback channel for SAP documentation. It enables collaboration, transparency, and traceability, allowing contributors to submit feedback, report issues, and suggest improvements to the documentation. Furthermore, GitHub's pull request feature allows for easy tracking of changes and revisions made to the documentation, ensuring that all contributors can see the status of their feedback. So yes, I like GitHub.

However, some individuals may prefer other channels for documentation feedback, such as email or a dedicated support forum. It is important to understand the reasons behind this preference and work towards improving the current documentation feedback system. Perhaps some users are not familiar with GitHub, or they do not feel comfortable submitting feedback through a public platform. In such cases, it may be helpful to offer alternative channels or provide guidance on how to use GitHub for documentation feedback.

je-hal
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert

Thank you for sharing your point of view. 
I think we're only at the beginning of improving our documentation feedback approach. Not sure if anyone noticed, but at the beginning of the initiative, we decided to hide the standard feedback option in the lower right of the HTML viewer, this one:
feedback-widget.png

After choosing "No" you can provide feedback anonymously. Unfortunately, such feedback is often not actionable. We added this option again, because we realized that our service guides often cover multiple target groups, and some of them might not be happy to use GitHub. Of course, authors then have to monitor two channels, but I think some also missed the option to get positive feedback. In GitHub, we hardly ever get positive feedback through issues, it seems inappropriate, so maybe it's good to have the 'thumbs up' option back.

We sometimes wonder if too many feedback options could confuse customers, what's your opinion on that?

thomsensoeren
Advisor
Advisor

I think it is amazing that SAP is starting to use GitHub for open documentation. Thanks a lot for doing it!