Things to discuss for dita.xml.org

["Su-Laine Yeo" <su-laine.yeo@justsystems.com>]

Hi everyone,

Do we have an agenda for this Monday's 7 AM PST meeting? If not, I'd
like to suggest a few things to discuss:

- Spend up to 20 minutes making some easy, quick decisions from the
suggestions here:
http://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita-adoption/Comments_about_focus_area . I
expect there are some low-hanging fruit here.

- Kick off a discussion, to be continued in email, about the mission of
dita.xml.org and the sustainability of the dita.xml.org project. 

In terms of mission, some of the things people want the site to be are:
- An "Encyclopedia of DITA" offering topically organized,
factually-oriented, neutral (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPOV) and
up-to-date information aimed primarily at a general audience, that is,
people considering DITA or implementing DITA. 
- A collection of opinion pieces and personal stories 
- A news feed
- A collection of ideas about what future versions of DITA and the Open
Toolkit should be
- A repository for proposals and specifications for the DITA Open
Toolkit

The site is currently all of these things, i.e. its mission is
effectively very broad. This is not an intrinsically bad objective,
however I don't think that the current infrastructure of the site
supports doing all of these things well. For example, users can't easily
restrict Search results to the encyclopedic parts of the site, so search
tends to bring up a lot of bewildering and outdated results.
Realistically, I doubt that we have energy to design and maintain a
Drupal-based site that can do all these things and also serve as a
high-quality Encyclopedia of DITA. I think the mission of designing and
maintaining a high-quality Encyclopedia of DITA should be our highest
priority. 

Regards,
Su-Laine


Su-Laine Yeo
Interaction Design Specialist 

JustSystems Canada, Inc.
Office: 778-327-6356 
syeo@justsystems.com
http://na.justsystems.com