Goodbye

["Jang Graat" <jang@jang.nl>]

Hello fellow DITA adopters,

My OASIS membership will end next month and I have decided not to renew it anymore. I have been slightly disappointed in the bureaucracy of the organization, which in my view stifles a lot of good creative energy of volunteers who are self-employed like myself. I simply cannot make the business case for this, not if I have to pay a hefty subscription fee plus put in a lot of time to end up with almost no return on all this investment in the end. There have to be better ways than this to make more people aware of the existence of DITA. And there are many other opportunities in my personal domain where I can put in volunteering time - most of which do not ask for a subscription fee on top of that.

I have at various occasions indicated my views about what an adoption committee should be doing and usually in those phone meetings my remarks got a lot of support. But the changes I have been hoping to see either did not happen at all or were marginal compared to the paradigm shift I think would be required.

A lot of this in my view rests on the particular way that OASIS is trying to keep a lid on anythng that might remotely be viewed as intellectual property. This leads to paralysis, instead of kindling the creative fire that makes some other adoption initiatives so succesful. While keeping things organized might be good for a standards body, the group that tries to make everyone aware of that standard should be left free to deploy initiatives in a much more effective and much less bureaucratic way.

I do applaud the recent initiatives to get off the article-writing track and into more appealing stuff like webinars, but this is not nearly going far and fast enough to my liking. I was hoping for some initiatives that make people outside the DITA community look up in surprise about this new thing they have apparently missed out on. Getting someone to write an article on the ROI of a DITA implementation in the Financial Times, even if that article would get some details about DITA wrong, would be much more useful for DITA consultants like me than having another technical article that has been reviewed to the last comma and can be proven to be the absolute truth.

The lack of speed and thereby the lack of impact on the world of tech comms at large has klled my enthusiasm and made me ignore most of what was being discussed on the official DITA website or in the various newsgroups. Those areas are for people who already know that DITA exists. The adoption committee in my view should devote most of its time and energy to getting NEW people to notice DITA.

So I wish you good luck and much wisdom as we move forward in different directions. If people want to discuss adoption strategies they are always welcome to contact me via e-mail or talk to me at the conferences where we will undoubtedly keep running into each other.

Good luck

Jang