Write for DOnations

Teach others and grow as an author while supporting tech-focused nonprofits and charities doing important work in the field.

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Details

What is Write for DOnations?

Write for DOnations is a program that supports people who create content for DigitalOcean’s public knowledge base. Through the program, community authors receive a personal payout and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.

The work of these community authors helps grow DigitalOcean’s library of DevOps, software development, and production systems tutorials—all based on free and open-source software.

Payouts

What is the payout structure?

Typical tutorial content pays out at $300, and we match all payouts with a charitable donation.

Most new tutorials are paid out at $300; complex production-focused topics may be paid out at up to $400. Updates for existing tutorials, such as distribution changes, are typically paid out at $75 to $125, based on the quantity of changes and technical content. All payouts are at editorial discretion, and will be matched by a donation to a single tech-focused charity or nonprofit or a group of nonprofits united by similar missions.

Additional DOnation FAQ

Testimonials

What people are saying

"Your articles will teach hundreds of thousands people all over the globe, and the feedback you receive from DigitalOcean's editors makes the difference between being a good author and a great author."

"Working with DigitalOcean editors means working with some of the best technical editors you'll find anywhere. No matter how good your writing is already, you'll end up a far better technical writer than when you just started."

Timeline

What is the publication process?

Apply, decide, write, revise, publish, and repeat.

  • Apply: Apply to the program with a writing sample that showcases your ability to explain your technical knowledge to others.
  • Decide: If you're accepted, you'll work with the editorial team on a topic and outline for your first tutorial. We publish only original, first-run content under a Creative Commons license.
  • Write: Once your topic is approved, it's time to write. We provide resources, like our writing guidelines and article templates, to help you get started.
  • Revise: Submit your first draft and collaborate one-on-one with a professional editor to revise your work.
  • Publish: After revisions, your editor will send your payment, publish your article, make your charitable contribution—and ask what you want to write about next. DigitalOcean will also promote your article across all of our social networks (including to our 150,000 Twitter followers).
  • Repeat: Build a relationship with the editorial team by suggesting new articles that you want to write.

Topics

What should I write about?

At a high level, we're looking for two broad categories of content.

When you apply, take a look at our public topic list for articles we're actively looking to publish or share your own ideas for unique content our readers will love.

At this time, we're not accepting content about closed-source or paid software, programming languages other than Python or JavaScript, reference articles on programming language features, or translations. For copyright reasons, we can't reprint content that has already been published elsewhere.

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Apply to Write For Donations

This is to make technical review easier if you are approved as an author. If you don't have an SSH key, please create one.

We evaluate writing samples based on the level and clarity of their technical explanations. We strongly prefer samples that match our style in that regard.

Feel free to share a link to your website, GitHub account, Twitter profile, etc. We'd love to know if you maintain or contribute significantly to any open-source projects. Let us know how you found our authorship program and what motivated you to apply, too!

If you experience any issues with this form, please reach out to us directly at writefordonations@digitalocean.com.

Our articles are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), meaning you can repost your DigitalOcean articles with attribution and with the same license on non-commercial sites after they're published here.

All of our community authors sign our freelance writers contract. The full text of the contract, along with a human-readable version of the legal jargon, is available publicly at writers.digitalocean.com.

Additional DOnation FAQ
https://www.digitalocean.com/write-for-donations/
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