"Gamifying" Documentation

[alecmuller]

Who wants to test drive our cool new robot?!
"Me! Me! Me!"

Who wants to write a improved control algorithm to help our robot perform better?!
"Me! Me! Me!"

Who wants to document our code, wiring, and CAD designs so other people can learn from the neat stuff we've done?!
*crickets*

Ars Technica covered a neat-looking new service from Stack Overflow that uses game-like incentives to encourage people to improve the state of a piece of code's documentation.

Every year the thousands of teams in FRC come up with some amazing designs, and while we all (mentors & students) learn from this process, I think we can go much further by figuring out better ways to document what we're doing.

As a mechanical person, I also appreciate GrabCAD as a documentation tool. Anyone can use it to share CAD files, and I think their revision-control system is also free to use. They also have a slightly game-like feedback system, and you can easily post both native CAD files (useful for ACTUALLY building on top of someone else's design) and STEP files (useful for importing designs from one package to another, like say Inventor to SolidWorks or vice versa). As an example, here's our 2015 robot (our only robot in recent years that was good enough to make it to world's) with both SolidWorks and STEP files. We still could have documented this far better than we did - for example with part and assembly drawings, spreadsheets for gear reduction calculations, and a full bill of materials.

What are your favorite tools for documenting your work to make it easier for you (and others) to build on top of it?