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Tue, Jul 3, 2007 15:03 EDT

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Posted by: Esther Schindler in Best Practices Topic: DevelopmentBlog: You're the Boss
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I started this series of blog posts with the intent of sharing with IT managers (and perhaps-someday managers) the process and experience of participating in an open source sprint. I have no idea whether this one is representative of most sprints, as it's my first—but I did come home with a few Lessons Learned.
First, 20 people can accomplish a huge amount in five days. I haven't yet found the summary of what the Get Paid team finished during the week, but here's a short summary of what the ten-or-so people working on documentation did, submitted to me kindly by JoAnna Springsteen:
"The goal behind holding a documentation sprint was to really dig in and fix up plone.org 's documentation. We have a lot of documents on a lot of topics but it's a standard complaint that no one can never find anything. After months of reorganizing, talking, and plotting, we decided that our goals for a doc sprint would be to reorganize the plone.org documentation area and deliver the latest release of Plone with up to date documentation. As the sprint comes to a close, I'm happy to report we have accomplished our intended goals.
"Our team of documentation sprinters in attendance included Aleksander Vladimirskiy, Joel Burton, Steve McMahon, Darci Hanning, Erik Rose, Bob Edmonston, Rob Stephenson, Balazs Reé, Jeff Pittman, Esther Schindler, Nate Aune, JoAnna Springsteen, and Veda Williams, as well as many virtual sprinters. This was possibly the first ever non-virtual documentation sprint. The sprint got off to a fantastic start thanks to all of our wonderful sponsors. Because of their support, we were able to cover a lot of the costs associated with the sprint. Our sponsors helped set a standard of support that I hope only grows more from here.
"So what exactly did we do out here in Silicon Valley for a week? Our biggest task and biggest success was the reorganization and redesign of the front page for plone.org/documentation. Erik Rose and Steve McMahon led us in a massive card sort where we all took turns trying to categorize all the documents from plone.org/documentation. Veda Williams and Joel Burton collaborated with Erik to work on a new design for plone.org/documentation that you will see very soon. Steve and Alex Clark also worked on updating the software for Plone Help Center so that it can support our new design and tagging of documents.
"Alex C. joined us a