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 Write for 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.”

Marko Mudrinić 
Joined April 2016

“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.”

Sunday Ogwu-Chinuwa 
Joined June 2014

Timeline

What is the publication process?

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

• Apply: Apply to the program with your topic idea, an outline of your tutorial, and a writing sample that showcases your ability to explain your technical knowledge to others. We publish only original, first-run content under a Creative Commons license.
• Collaborate: If you're accepted, you'll work with the editorial team to refine your topic and outline for your tutorial.
• Write: Once your topic is approved, it's time to write. We provide resources, like our writing guidelines, technical best practices recommendations 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.

• Tutorials that walk the reader through creating a real-world project in Python or JavaScript from start to finish, like: How To Crawl A Web Page with Scrapy and Python
• Tutorials that cover advanced systems topics such as Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Terraform, and CI/CD, like: How to Create a Cluster of Docker Containers with Docker Swarm and DigitalOcean on Ubuntu 16.04

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.

Apply Now

Apply to Write For DOnations

Thank you for your interest in the Write for DOnations program. We've temporarily suspended our application process for new authors while we work through all of the wonderful content people have submitted.

Check back soon!

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.

Additional Write for DOnation FAQ