We handle our release notes by separating them into beats, where various community members take ownership of a particular piece of the distribution. They pay attention to features and developments in that area, and make sure that the relevant page of release notes is updated with all the news that users, sysadmins, and other developers will want to read.
We need more beat owners — it only takes a couple hours of time total for a release, not all at once, and the Docs team will take care of cleaning up the content for you once it’s there. You don’t need to be a formal Docs team member or have any special access other than a Fedora account, which lets you edit the wiki.
Our Release Notes typically are chock full of important information and give the many people helping users on the front lines a place to point: “Read this, it explains why/how/when.” If you can’t spend a lot of time helping end users one on one, this is a great way to have a major impact on potentially thousands of people at a time with just a few hours of contribution.
With the release of Fedora 10 Beta, we’re starting the countdown to the Preview Release. So now’s the time for all good Fedorans to come to the aid of their Project! Or something like that.