Season of Docs 2024 Organization Application: p5.js

🌸 Hello! p5.js is applying for Season of Docs this year. Below is our application.

Create p5.js Critical AI Tutorials - Processing Foundation

About your organization

p5.js is a free open-source JavaScript library for creative coding, which focuses on making coding accessible and inclusive for artists, designers, educators, and beginners. Using the metaphor of a sketch, p5.js provides a full set of drawing functionalities, along with features using text, input, video, webcam, and sound. With over 1.5 million users worldwide, including students from K12 to universities, p5.js has become a popular tool for hobbyists and professionals alike. Access, inclusion, and diversity are the core values guiding the p5.js project and community.

The p5.js project has fostered a thriving and engaged community on GitHub, with 20.8k GitHub stars, 3.2k forks, and over 600 contributors.

About your project

Your project’s problem

With the exponential growth of AI tools available, many creators are incorporating them into their work with the p5.js library. Yet AI can be overwhelming and difficult to navigate for users who are new to programming or p5.js, particularly for those who hope to create with AI beyond the basics and want to do so mindfully.

Challenges the documentation faces include 1) addressing AI’s expanded use within the context of the p5.js library, while 2) maintaining the documentation’s approachable language for newcomers, 3) without reducing the complexity of its ethical concerns.

The proposed project will create tutorials that contextualize critical AI approaches for the p5.js community, by focusing on conscientious use. These will be written in a similar beginner-friendly style to existing p5.js tutorials introducing new users to debugging, unit testing, and open-source contribution—concepts which are not exclusive to the p5.js library but transferable to new tools and contexts. The documentation will help users understand the key technical concepts underlying the AI systems they use, and it will explain how AI methods connect to the p5.js library. Most importantly, it will highlight how to use AI in their p5.js work conscientiously, by considering common pitfalls and ethical concerns, making informed choices using data cards and model cards, and understanding the complexity of AI through clear, concise language. By expanding the p5.js documentation to highlight important AI use cases, this documentation will support the project’s sustainability and its community growth.

Your project’s scope

The "Create p5.js Critical AI Tutorials" project aims to:

• Research common use cases for p5.js with AI tools
• Write a series of tutorials with clear explanations of AI fundamentals and critical AI approaches for an introductory audience, accompanied by short code examples.
• Share project findings with the p5.js community through a live presentation or blog post.

Work that is out-of-scope for this project:

• This project will not create tutorials addressing comprehensive or specialized use cases.
• It will not replace documentation for related libraries like ml5.js
• It will not produce lengthy examples designed to cut and paste without offering critical context

Skills Required

• Familiarity with JavaScript and p5.js
• Experience with GitHub
• Experience teaching p5.js to beginners, either in K12 and/or college
• Experience writing coding tutorials for beginners
• Communication skills
• Project management skills
• Commitment to community building

Personnel

Hired Writer: Sarah Ciston

Possible Mentor: Emily Martinez

With support from p5.js Project Lead: Qianqian Ye

Measuring your project’s success

To measure the success of our project, we will track following key metrics related to the reference and example documentation:

• A 10% increase in the number of page visitors to the p5.js tutorial page.
• A 10% increase in the number of p5.js project using AI tools

Timeline

The project itself will take approximately about six months to complete, with 250 working hours in total. Once the technical writer is hired, we'll spend a month on technical writer orientation and project mapping, then move onto the audit and friction log, and spend the last few months focusing on improving the documentation.

Dates	Action Items
May	Orientation and project mapping with mentor, review the existing common use cases for p5.js with AI tools.
June	Research common use cases for p5.js with AI tools.
July - October	Write a series of tutorials with clear explanations of AI fundamentals and critical AI approaches for an introductory audience, accompanied by short code examples.
November	Project completion, ​​and share project findings presentation (live-presentation or blog-post to Processing Foundation Medium publication and social media)

Project budget

General guidelines

Our proposed budget:

Budget Item	Amount	Running Total	Notes
Technical Writer Stipend	$13,000	$13,000
Mentor Stipend	$1,500	$14,500
Advisor Stipend	$500	$15,000
TOTAL		$15,000

TOTAL: 15000.00

Additional information

The p5.js project has been an active participant in Google Season of Docs, having participated in both 2021, 2022, and 2023. In 2023, Nick McIntyre worked on “Improve p5.js Reference and Example Docs”. In 2022, Kenneth Lim worked on the "Organize and Develop p5.js Contributor Docs" project. In 2021, Ashley Jane Lewis and Alm Chung worked on the "New p5.js Contributors Onboarding Documentation" and "p5.js Friendly Error System Documentation" projects, respectively. You can read more about these projects in the published case studies (2023 case study, 2022 case study, 2021 case study).

Since 2013, p5.js has mentored over 100 contributors through various programs, including Google Summer of Code, Rails Girls Summer of Code, and our own Fellowship Program. Many of these projects have focused on documentation, which is a critical aspect of both the user-facing and contributor-facing aspects of the p5.js project. Sarah Ciston, a potential technical writer for our proposed project, served as a mentor for "New p5.js Contributors Onboarding Documentation" projects through Google Season of Docs in 2021.

Another collaboration with a technical writer took place in 2018 working with one of our Fellows, Vijith Assar. Over a period of six months, Vijith worked closely with his mentor Lauren McCarthy to survey the contributor-facing documentation and document the layout of the github repository, guiding design principles, and contributor docs. Through this work we were able to significantly increase the number of contributors and their ease of working on the project.