DITA Technical Committee Meeting Minutes: 10 May 2011

["Bruce Nevin (bnevin)" <bnevin@cisco.com>]

DITA Technical Committee Meeting Minutes: 10 May 2011

Chaired by Don Day donday@bga.com
Minutes recorded by Bruce Nevin <bnevin@cisco.com>
 
The DITA Technical Committee met on Tuesday, 10 May 2011 at 08:00am PT for 55 minutes.

8:00-8:05 Roll call

 o  Regrets: JoAnn Hackos, Eliot Kimber, Michael Priestley

> Quorum was established.
> Don and Kris will both be away May 24; Bruce will chair; we will need a scribe.

STANDING BUSINESS:

Approve minutes from previous business meeting:

 o  http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201105/msg00013.html (Nevin, amended version)

> Acceptance moved by Don, seconded by Dick Hamilton, approved by acclamation.

Subcommittee/liaison reports:

 o  OASIS DITA for Enterprise Business Documents Subcommittee *Boses)

> Michael Boses: The SC is interested in helping organizations adopt DITA as an authoring standard by comparing DITA with the structural model of identified business documents, and helping them understand how to harmonize the structures of their documents with DITA and how to deploy it to different departments and applications without creating islands and silos. For this, we need to provide the simplest deployment in all sorts of editors, some of them limited in presentation and function. 

We also looked into semantic metamodels and how they apply to business documents. These document types are common to many industries. There is much call for document types other than for tech pubs from pharmaceutical, financial, marketing, central government, divisional government, NGOs, and more. Types include protocol study reports, control documents, project analyses, SOPs, legislative memoranda, situation analyses, committee proceedings, reports, and so on. Topic orientation, topic boundaries, and reuse of content, are all very important, but authoring a contiguous document is particularly important to these adopters. Two foci emerge:
> 1. Aggregated authoring 
> 2. A core business topic
> There are diverse ways to do aggregated authoring. Potential adopters want to see a recognized and well supported way to do this. We have drafted a 23-page document that describes the user requirements and the various approaches with pros and cons. We'd like this to be ready by the end of June. Questions to the TC: What is the right forum  and form to do this? What's the TC's guidance to get this done in a reasonable time?
> Our work on the notion of a core business topic overlaps the discussion of the complication of DITA. Organizations trying to apply DITA to their document types and structures have an enormity of detail to try to grasp. Rather than grapple with the full standard and determine what to leave out, it's much easier for them to grasp a simplified topic and then investigate what they need to add from the full DITA standard. We would like to provide a constrained topic for this purpose as part of the aggregated authoring offering.
> Don: As to TC review of the SC draft, probably best to schedule a review the second week of June after most members have returned from conferences send out a notice and get it on the TC agenda. 

ACTION (Michael Boses): Send links to document etc. mid June announcing review.
ACTION (Don Day): Put the review of the document in the agenda for a following meeting.
ACTION (Bruce): Tell JoAnn and Gershon that the Technical Communication SC is up next

BUSINESS:

1. ITEM: Perceptions that DITA is complex
   * http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/dita/email/archives/201105/msg00001.html (Stan Doherty, TMon, 02 May 2011 13:51:09 -0400 -- recent e-mail on thread)
   * Wiki page: "What do people (really) mean when they say "DITA is too complex"?
   * http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201105/msg00006.html (Doherty updates this past week)

> Stan: I have reduced the apparent complexity of the complexity matrix by consolidating closely related items into groups.
> Don: What are the TC steps for ranking these? Do we want to be issues driven, or do we want to put some thought into how we want to organize topics for DITA 1.3? 
> Bruce: The latter sounds like a more productive course for us in the long term. 
> Don: Let's review and discuss this matrix in the coming week, considering what should be in the scope of DITA 1.3.
> Stan: We have a proposal process in place that permits anything to come to the table, though it must be proven necessary. Are we limiting proposals to this matrix? 
> Don: We should have some architectural goals in place to guide ranking.
> Robert: It makes sense to say we want to come up with some goals and use them to weight decisions. However, the notion of ranking is of some concern to me. What's the goal of ranking? Include only the top ten items?
> Bruce: triage is a separate process.
> Robert: I don't think we can draw a line. Items 15 through 17 may be really urgent for some people. Don: survival of the fittest, then.
> Bruce: I take your point that we're too ill informed now to assign priorities.
> Stan: A first order categorization might be TC, Adoption TC, too wild to consider, that sort of categorization. 
> Robert: If we want to allocate to the two committees, that sounds fine. But we shouldn't spend too much time on these while they're still such vague ideas. 
> Don: We need to look at how completely we have covered what we need to consider for DITA 1.3.
> Bruce: The complexity findings are only one source of info for DITA 1.3.
> Don: How do we know when we've finished with our issues list? If this is being driven primarily by issues reported to the field, how do we ensure that we consider issues that need to be advanced? 
> Robert: I think we just need to start and see where we get. I don't think we can rule out people coming up with changes along the way. The new idea is that it should be a hard sell to get something into the spec, whether it's already on the list or gets proposed months down the road. We can't figure out our cutoff point now.
> Don: That's reasonable. Revising the question: With DITA 1.3 for the time being probably the last major version before we start thinking about DITA 2.0, do we need to do any thinking about DITA 1.3 to get people preparing? 
> Robert: That requires its own discussion. DITA 2.0 is so far out that we'd need a very clear crystal ball to guide any discussion. We may put some forcasts of DITA 2.0 changes in the DITA 1.3 spec, but generally we avoid that, because too often such things ultimately are not designed as expected.
> Robert: Stan, are you offering to do the triage of the complexity issues? 
> Stan: JoAnn and Kris wanted to be in the discussion. Grouping e.g. for Adoption TC may meet revision, for example. The process that we have in place effectively describes the triage process. We could make a handoff of identified items to the Adoption TC an explicit part of that process; it's implicit now.
> Stan: The process is focused on new features. I'm guessing that near zero of the items in this wiki are features. 
> Robert: Ah, what I've said then doesn't apply to this. Yes, we should move ahead with a triage on the matrix, and probably moving most of them over to adoption is right. We should do this when Kris and JoAnn are present.

ACTION (Don): Set a new agenda item for discussion of 1.3 features 

2. ITEM: FAQ item about "Interaction between key resolution or key binding and conditional processing"

   * TC review the draft: "What is the interaction between key resolution or key binding and conditional processing?": http://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita/FAQ-items#Q.Whatistheinteractionbetweenkeyresolutionorkeybindingandconditionalprocessing.3F
 o  Wiki page for review comments: http://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita/Review-FAQ-
 o  Waiting for Kris to edit
 o  Close once we're ready to post FAQ item on xml.org.

CONTINUED waiting for Kris's action.

3. ITEM: Question on @locktitle for topichead and topicgroup elements
   * http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201103/msg00069.html (Yeo)
   * http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201104/msg00010.html (Anderson summary)

> DECISION: For DITA 1.2, clarify the language as discussed.
> for DITA 1.3, this is covered in proposal 13073
> (see http://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita/DITA_1.3_Proposals#preview).
CLOSED

4. ITEM: DITA 1.2 Survey results
   * http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201104/msg00006.html (Summary, posted by Buchholz)
   * http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201104/msg00007.html (Full, ")
   * Need TC's discussion on using this knowledge
CONTINUED

5. New ITEM: OASIS TC F2F Meeting Option
   * http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201105/msg00007.html (Don, fwd from Harnad)
> Don: International Cloud Symposium in the U.K. presents potential for f2f meeting. Do enough of us have reason either to be at that conference or at another close by? The two that I've listed are probably out of scope. Are there others? [None proposed.]
OPEN inviting further suggestions.

We all expressed thanks to Su-Laine for her hard work, so graciously presented, and wish her well deserved recognition and success in her new writing and interaction design business. The hint of her possibly rejoining "one or more committees" as an individual is a welcome prospect that partially compensates our loss.