I wanted to let everyone know that there will be two sprints immediately after Drupalcon Portland: a doc team sprint focused on the Drupal.org content, followed the next day by a sprint focused on evolving Drupal as a technical communication CMS.
Doc Team Sprint - Friday, May 24
This will be part of the larger Drupalcon sprint day. The main thrust of the sprint will be to move forward on Drupal 8 documentation but it will also be a great opportunity to learn more about the Drupal.org docs. It's definitely an event where everyone can make a contribution, no matter what your background is.
Drupal Tech Comm CMS Sprint - Saturday, May 25
Out of the box, Drupal provides some amazing capabilities for technical communication but it's nowhere near mature or complete as a tech comm solution (or at least not without a substantial amount of work). This sprint will be focused on rounding out those capabilities. Eventually it may result in a tech comm distro and will certainly improve the doc tools for drupal.org.
I'm really happy that this sprint will have the participation of Kristof Van Tomme of Provonix and Jennifer Hogdon of Poplarware.
Kristof has been working in this space for a long time, particularly with Drupal implementations of the DITA standard and, more recently, his company has developed Walkthrough, a tool that looks like it will revolutionize the way web-based tutorials are created (reducing the need for documentation at the same time).
Jennifer, of course, is the previous Doc Team Lead, and continues to do an amazing job leading the Drupal API documentation effort. Working with a GSOC student, she's already laid the groundwork for improving the drupal.org documentation system. You can read a summary of that vision here.
If you're already using Drupal as a tech comm CMS, I'd encourage you to share your experiences here and let me know if you want to get involved in this sprint.
We'll have more information about these events over the coming weeks.