Not to Ant specifically, but to written communication about Ant or any
other topic.

I'm employed, but no, I do not manage Ant. :)

In order to participate in a collaborative effort, one need
communication skills.  More to the point, you are asking other people
for help; to do so in such a lazy fashion makes your request more
difficult for others to read, and is rude.

Who needs to care about other people?  Someone who wants their help.

   Find an open source project you really like, and use it a lot. Read its
source code. Try to find bugs. Submit fixes for these bugs. When you submit
a large enough amount of them, the developers will start remembering your
name and recognizing you. Ask to join the development team. Learn by
watching what the other programmers do.

   - Oliver

The tools, the style and amount of design documentation is based on a
methodology or personal discretion. Many like to use a lot of visual
charts like UML, often providing a full set. Others might just do use
case and a flow chart for each one along with some modular design. The
open source out there you can read and borrow from or discuss on the
project forums at source forge. Large projects like ant usually have an
online community. The sets of tools that are used are based on the
project as well. Sometimes, there could be a mix of two languages and
so a mix of two IDEs ie: CodeWarrior using C and Eclipse for Java etc.
There is usually some sort of version control and build like ant. Those
two make for very basic stuff. I hinted at a few other design tools if
you took it more seriously. I mean, seriously, check out projects like
maven or cruisecontrol and see what they might offer for your project.
Check out technologies like AOP and see how they might simplify part of
your design. Check out forums like theserverside (ok, there's probably
better), there are journals out there, IRC chat rooms (ie: #java on
freenode), blogs galore, "source communities" galore and it just takes
networking around and taking notes and asking a lot of people. For
general "development methodology" there are various crowds out there.
Some like XP without documentation and more code. Some like formalized
stuff like Rational RUP or even older and more formal, PSP. You could
check out "pragmatic" development bloggers like joelonsoftware who have
"sanity checks" for the tools you might want to use. There are
alternative "best practices" and consulting groups out there. I mean,
it's a little hard to answer without just taking the time to explore on
your own but I've given you what I can.