Your Guide to How CNCF Projects Actually Do Documentation

  Aidan Delaney, Bloomberg
  Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti, Elastic
  Tiffany Hrabusa, Grafana Labs
  Natali Vlatko, Cisco
  Nate Waddington, CNCF

Maintainer Summit — KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026

March 22, 2026

Building & Organizing a Docs Team

Building & Organizing a Docs Team

  • How do you build a docs team within an open source project?
  • What org models work? Centralized docs team vs. distributed ownership?
  • How do mentorship programs help grow docs contributors?
    • OTel–Prometheus docs mentorship
    • Kubernetes Korean localization LFX mentorship & AI-tooling work
CC BY 4.0 |

Contributor On-Ramps

Contributor On-Ramps

  • What does a genuinely low-friction first docs contribution look like?
  • Do you create and curate good first issues for new contributors?
  • How do you move someone from "first PR" to "trusted reviewer"?
CC BY 4.0 |

Docs Ownership & Drift

Docs Ownership & Drift

  • Who owns fixing incorrect docs — feature maintainers or the docs team?
  • Can you prevent drift? Is it process, automation, or both?
    • Docs-as-code automation, CI checks, linting
  • OTel Collector docs refactoring as a case study
CC BY 4.0 |

Localization

Localization

  • Who's in charge of localization? How is it organized?
  • What guardrails are in place for quality and consistency?
  • How do you signal freshness or staleness of translated content?
  • Kubernetes SIG Docs localization subproject as a model
CC BY 4.0 |

Docs in the Age of AI

Docs in the Age of AI

  • AI tools increasingly answer questions directly — how is this
    changing engagement patterns around tech docs?
  • If docs traffic declines, what are docs for?
    • Discovery, learning, AI consumption, community, or a combination?
  • How should this affect our tech docs strategy going forward?
  • How do you ask for and incorporate feedback about docs?
CC BY 4.0 |

Questions?

Colophon

This presentation was built with Marp and is available under CC BY 4.0.

Source: github.com/nate-double-u/talks
Path: KCCN-EU-Maintainer-Summit-2026/docs-panel/presentation/slides.md
Theme: Maintainer Summit 2026 (based on KubeConEU26-Maintainer-Summit_ppt.pptx)