Today's Documentation Sprint at DrupalCon DC was a brilliantly productive success! For folks who are unfamiliar with the sprint concept, as I was before today, here's what happened: folks gathered both physically in DC and virtually on IRC (#drupal-docs) to come up with a list of documentation tasks that need tackling. We then divided up into small, ad-hoc teams to collaboratively tackle those tasks.

By our conservative estimate, more than 70 people showed up in person. Folks also participated online in a great demonstration of the potential for real-time collaboration despite geographical distance. All of the work was done in the hopes of creating cleaner, clearer, and more accessible and useful documentation for members of the Drupal community, whatever their skill level or familiarity with Drupal might be. Likewise, people at all levels of familiarity and experience with Drupal participated in the documentation sprint itself.

Our sprint organizers, including add1sun and the many other Cat Herders whose names I unfortunately don't know, did a tremendous job of guiding documentation newbies and old hats alike through the sprint process, and we owe them much gratitude for helping everyone else do excellent work today. (If you're one of the people who took on the difficult Cat Herder role, please speak up in the comments! And if they don't, other people should give them shout outs!)

Here's a glimpse into the accomplishments of the day. This is a very incomplete list, and individual attributions are here only when they were very obvious so many tasks and names are not explicitly mentioned here. I strongly encourage folks to talk more about their work and accomplishments in the comments! Please, toot your own horns and get the appreciation you deserve from your community!

• In one of the major undertakings of the day, folks reviewed existing documentation for comments that included information that should be rolled into their parent pages, then deleting the rolled-in comments to avoid redundancy. ceardach, bryan kennedy, and Senpai helped develop a great system for keeping track of which comments needed deletion and which had been deleted, and tons of other folks helped review, report, and delete unneeded comments (including sepeck, who helped from home, and bsmirnov, who helped review this post I'm writing while we rode the BoltBus back to NYC!) Check out this issue filed by ceardach to find out what's left to be done on this task; if you look at the lists of comments that have been or still need deletion you'll also see the handles of many of the other folks who worked on this.
• rootwork redrafted the Theming Views 2 page, integrating information from the comments there and two external guides.
• bmoreinis and baronmunchowsen updated the Advertisement module documentation, incorporating files from CVS into the Handbook for both Drupal 5 and 6.
• A breakout group met to discuss the current organization of the documentation section, with an eye to usability issues and architecture. A meeting will soon be held in Toronto to plan for a Documentation redesign, and today's group brainstormed ideas to take to that meeting.
• margaux, laken, LeeHunter, me and many others did tons of work on the Handbook style and structure pages. Folks working in the Meta group and elsewhere also collaborated on the new Drupal.org documentation vocabularies, which are explained on the Handbook structure page.

As a complete newbie to documentation, sprints, and DrupalCons, I thought that the documentation sprint was an excellent way to get involved with the community and make a meaningful contribution to the Drupal project. The sprint was also the perfect way to finish off a wonderful five days of building connections and knowledge. I encourage folks at all levels of expertise to participate in future sprints, whether physically or virtually present!