Re: Contribution of Sun documentation team to the GDP.

[John Fleck <jfleck inkstain net>]

Pat -

Thanks for the frank note. I am not surprised that y'all have been
forced to this uncomfortable decision. It's been clear, in watching how
hard your team has been working, that meeting the two overlapping
release schedules has been a huge burden.

The Sun documentation team has provided a strong body of documentation
from which to work. We have had quite a few new volunteers recently
looking for a way to contribute to documentation. This provides an
opportunity for the new folks to get involved, taking responsibility for
a document and updating it for the 2.8 release cycle.

If the individuals who take over responsibility for community release
documentation for each app and document can establish lines of
communication with their counterparts on the Sun docs team, this can
work to achieve much of what Mark suggested. When you have documentation
updated on your schedule that is useful to the community, it could be
integrated into the community docs.

This will have the added benefit of addressing a problem that we have
had for the last several release cycles: when new folks want to
contribute to documentation, there's not been much for them to do,
because the Sun team has been doing so much of the work themselves. As
problems go, this has been a good one, but a problem nevertheless.

The details of managing this will need to be worked out (that's probably
better done as a separate discussion on the docs list), but I think it
is manageable.

Cheers,
John