The Doc Exchange: alan mcclellan's blog

In discussion with some of our community members, have heard that the Sun doc set represents the "crown jewels" of technical information. And I heard this "crown jewels" quote not long after chatting at CommunityOne with folks who were clearly in awe of the wealth and breadth of technical information produced and provided by Sun. So, all-in-all, I think that speaks volumes about the competency and wherewithal of the Sun doc teams. (Plus, they can write killer haikus.) Now, as a company diving into the open source swimming pool, I think we're in a unique position vis-a-vis other open source distributors who rely pretty much solely on the community to produce their technical documentation. We've got these crown jewels as our basis. Seems to me, the trick moving forward is to keep them polished (i.e., accurate, up-to-date, and easy to access) while adding gems from the community. In my mind, I see these as a bunch of small, focussed topics (how-tos, cookbook recipes) that the community experiences in depth and breadth greater than any given doc team can anticipate or accommodate. The trick, I think, is to make the barrier of entry low so it's painless to donate those gems to the collection.