Not Ready For Prime Time (Liferay)

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So, I post to the Liferay community wiki an early draft of an article that is barely more than topic sentences with no real detail. Then I get the edict to post a blog to the community to encourage feedback. I thought my blog was pretty innocuous, until the one of the project engineers and the engineering manager realize that I’m blogging about features that really aren’t ready, and that the community would have little interest in providing input and feedback. So, after I had (unsuccessfully) spent two weeks of asking the engineers for feedback on the article before I first posted, I managed to get enough additional detail to post a revised draft that may have enough content to actually pique the interest of the community and actually get feedback.

So, the process of collaborating with the community on open source documentation is somewhat hindered by the fact that evangelism of the community often occurs at the same time (to drum up support). It seems to me like a situation of putting the horse before the cart. You may just need stable software builds (with real features) before you can write articles that you can circulate to the community for comment.

I guess the devil is in the details.

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