Hi everyone,

I am seeking re-election as Documentation PTL for Newton. I have now been the
docs PTL for two releases (Liberty and Mitaka), and would love another term in
the middle of the alphabet! We've achieved a lot this time around, including
an almost complete conversion to RST, quite a few structural overhauls of
popular books, and some fundamental toolchain improvements. There is still
lots to be done, though, and I would love your support to achieve this in
Newton.

During Liberty we got the bulk of our books migrated away from Docbook XML and
into RST. In Mitaka, we completed that work (with only the Ops Guide remaining
to be converted in Newton). For the last couple of releases, we've also had a
focus on improving the information architecture of our books, and have now
successfully completed overhauls of our most popular books, with the
Architecture Guide also well underway. All of these tasks will be carried over
to Newton, with many of them finally coming to completion. In Newton, I would
also like to address some of the larger issues around the organisation of our
documentation suite, making it easier for developers to contribute quality
code to our docs, and better welcoming and introducing new big tent projects
to the documentation team.

At the Mitaka summit in Tokyo, we decided to make a concerted effort to pay
down a lot of our tech debt, and one of the main ways we chose to do that was
to change the way we handled the DocImpact flag in our bugs. We merged those
changes to DocImpact about a month ago now, and it is already having a
significant impact on the amount of untriaged bugs outstanding. We're now much
more able to keep on top of our bug queue, which is giving us a much greater
ability to pay down tech debt. In this vein, we also have put a lot of effort
into ensuring new contributors have a better onboarding experience to docs,
with the creation of our new Contributor Guide which replaces a lot of old
wiki-based content, a great 'get started with docs' campaign at the last
Summit (which resulted in a hard copy article in the Summit edition of
SuperUser, and Anne and I on SuperUser TV), and a general willingness to
respond to questions on the mailing lists and help out new users wherever we
find them.

In the Liberty release cycle, we closed just over 600 bugs, and we're very
close to matching that number for Mitaka, with 505 bugs closed as I write
this. Again, we've managed to keep on top of the aging bugs as well, with all
bugs older than a year now closed. In the Mitaka release, we managed to close
16 blueprints, which is a massive increase over Liberty's 7.

I'm very excited about making the trek to Austin soon for the Newton summit,
to catch up with old friends, and hopefully meet some of our newest
contributors. Please be sure to stop for a chat if you see me around :)

I'd love to have your support for the PTL role for Newton, and I'm looking
forward to continuing to grow the documentation team.

Thanks,
Lana (@loquacities)