Strong open source projects do not happen by accident. They are built through sustained effort, shared ownership, and a community of people who understand the power of GIS tools and care about making software like QGIS accessible, reliable, and useful for everyone.
In this talk, we introduce the people behind one part of that work: the documentation team and the project administrative assistant. The documentation team currently includes two full-time writers, and this year QGIS welcomed a new colleague, an administrative assistant supporting the QGIS Project Steering Committee and the wider project. Having dedicated, funded roles like these is still quite new for open source projects, and we see it as an important step toward long-term sustainability. We want to introduce ourselves and share what this work really looks like.
We will walk through our documentation review: what we audited, what we improved, what we rewrote, and what we learned along the way. This includes pull requests and community contributions, new and reworked content sections, progress on translations that bring QGIS closer to more communities worldwide, and workflow improvements that make contributing to documentation easier for everyone.
We will also talk honestly about what full-time open source work feels like in practice - collaborative and rewarding, but also full of real challenges. Keeping pace with a fast-moving codebase, deciding what to prioritise, supporting community contributors, and building a team culture within a volunteer-rooted project all take more effort than they might appear from the outside.
Finally, we will look ahead: expanding coverage, improving the experience for new contributors, strengthening the connection between development and documentation cycles, and making the annual review reports a lasting and useful practice.
If you use QGIS, contribute to it, or are simply curious about what it takes to keep a large open source project well documented and welcoming, this talk is for you.