Open source projects run on volunteered attention, and writing is how that attention is either earned or wasted. A maintainer who answers the same question forty times has lost forty hours to a paragraph they never wrote. A contributor who spends a weekend on a pull request that is rejected on a convention nobody documented rarely returns. And a project whose governance is unwritten discovers, usually during its first serious disagreement, that everyone had assumed a different set of rules.

We edit what maintainers and open source foundations produce — README and project landing pages, contributing guides and development setup instructions, codes of conduct and enforcement procedures, governance documents and decision-making processes, maintainer and reviewer role descriptions, issue and pull request templates, roadmaps and request-for-comment proposals, release notes and upgrade guides, security policies and disclosure processes, licence explanations and contributor licence agreements, sponsorship and funding pages, grant applications to foundations, and documentation sites for the software itself. Our editors check that the contribution path is executable by someone who has never touched the project, and that the project's expectations of contributors and of maintainers are both written down.

The contributing guide deserves more care than it usually receives, because it is where the project either converts interest into contribution or loses it. Most are written as a list of rules — commit format, branch naming, sign-off requirement — which tells a newcomer what will get them told off but not how to start. We rewrite these so the first section gets a contributor from a clean clone to a passing test suite with the exact commands, including the setup steps that only fail on other people's machines; so good first issues are described in terms of the skill they need rather than the label they carry; so the review process states who reviews, how long it usually takes, and what happens if it does not; and so the project says plainly what it will not accept, which saves far more volunteer effort than any style rule. Projects that write this section well see the composition of their contributor base change within months.

Everything you send is handled in confidence, including embargoed security advisories, draft governance documents and grant applications. Whether you are a solo maintainer with more issues than time, a project formalising governance as it grows, or a foundation standardising documentation across many repositories, we can make the writing welcoming and precise, and we are glad to work with maintainers writing in English as an additional language.