I was recently introduced to a new online service called FLOSS Manuals (more later on how and why I was introduced to it). It's a fascinating concept: take the collaborative environment benefits of wiki tools, force a degree of refinement (wikis, by their nature, seem to be perpetually incomplete), multi-purpose the output so that the content can be viewed online, exported to pdf, or printed as a book, and then tailor it to the realm of software documentation.

End result? A place where open source software users can gather and develop documentation manuals and truly have an end product suitable for publication.

It seems the preferred methodology for cranking out content is through a book sprint. Basically the idea is that you lock a dozen people in a room for a week, focus entirely on the softare documentation project, and walk away with a very high percentage of the project completed.