It takes a community to build a community

It's been fascinating to be part of an exercise to build an information portal around our flagship product, GemFire Enterprise. Since the product is in its fifth year of existence, we knew that there would be a lot to say. Rather than try to regiment how information was put together, we took the approach that they say was used when the Taj Mahal was built. Craftsmen from all over the engineering team were given broad guidelines on things we wanted to cover and then given full reign to describe anything they wanted to communicate to other developers and architects, as long as it was factually correct. The review process involved peer reviews with a view to enhance or cross link with other articles or notes on the portal. It was good to watch different engineers working collaboratively, critiquing each other's work and adding examples that enhanced the document under review. Given the sheer number of articles that were developed, it was impossible for any one person or a small group of people to review everything. Feeble attempts made by some to sanitize the content , robbed it of some of the originality but the vast majority of content came through unscathed. The result? The most transparent product literature that I have seen put together in such a short period of time. It tells you what you can do with the product, what you can do but shouldn't and what you cannot do at all. It tells you why the product is good at doing certain things and what things would be difficult to do architecturally.

I watched my friends struggle with producing screen casts and struggled to do the same myself but none of us had any plans to give up until we were satisfied with the outcome. Much like baboons in the waterlogged Okavango, we gingerly found our way across the swamp, by being hard on ourselves and polite and encouraging to those around us.

My team and I are done with our out of body experience and ready to return to the world of mere developers and architects.