RE: [dita-adoption-fasc] Groups - Minutes, 16 March 2009 (Focus_area subcommitte_meeting_16_March_2009.txt) uploaded

["Carol Geyer" <carol.geyer@oasis-open.org>]

I didn't realize the Events page was broken. It's fixed now. It displays only upcoming events in calendar order. (Individual pages for past events remain on the site, but they are dropped from the main Events index page.) 

http://dita.xml.org/events

--carol


-----Original Message-----
From: kjeberle@us.ibm.com [mailto:kjeberle@us.ibm.com] 
Sent: Monday, March 16, 2009 12:06 PM
To: dita-adoption-fasc@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [dita-adoption-fasc] Groups - Minutes, 16 March 2009 (Focus_area subcommitte_meeting_16_March_2009.txt) uploaded

-------------------------------------------------------
      Focus Area Subcommittee Minutes
                Monday, 16 March 2009
-------------------------------------------------------

Minutes recorded by Kris Eberlein


1. ROLL CALL
Present: Kris Eberlein, Scott Tsao, Don Day, and Gershon Joseph.


2. REVIEW AGENDA
Kris asked that it be modified to include a report from Gershon about the
Adoption committee's discussion of the draft mission statement.


3. REPORT FROM ADOPTION COMMITTEE
Gershon reported that the committee had discussed both the overall
structure of dita.xml.org (especially forums and events) and the draft of
the mission 

statement. 

People had divergent options about the forum. Some people think this should
be handled by the Yahoo! group alone; others think that the forums provide
an 

opportunity for discussion that is not on the Yahoo! list but that is still
public. If the forum is retained, it needs work to so that it can be used
in an 

optimal function; a knowledgeable person must monitor it frequently.

Gershon mentioned that he thought that that many threads on dita-users
would yield a fruitful DITA FAQ, similar to the way in which Bob Stayton
authored 

"Docbook XSL: A Complete Guide" (now in its 4th edition) based on user
group comments.

Regarding the mission statement, discussion ensued about where the DITA
Open Toolkit should be in a prioritized list. Vendors wanted it lower;
Su-Laine's 

suggestion to deemphasize advertising was also contentious.


4. DISCUSSION ABOUT MISSION STATEMENT AND SITE

General discussion about the importance of the DITA Open Toolkit as the
reference standard and most mature implementation. 

Don Day raised the point that most vendor's implementations tend to be
geared towards a  particular processing stream, for example, PDF. He
reminded 

subcommittee members that WinAnt and the DITA Open Platform are two open
implementations that attempt to provide a more user-friendly interface for
the DITA 

Open Toolkit. He suggested that perhaps better documentation of the DITA
Open Toolkit samples and how to run them from the command line might be
helpful for 

DITA adopters.

Scott Tsao reiterated the point that he made earlier by e-mail, that he
thought content modeling, implementation details, and the items listed as
3-6 in Su-

Laine's original e-mail were most important to him. And there are a lot of
different ways to implement DITA: specialization or not, conversion of
legacy 

documentation or not ...

Kris Eberlein raised the point that two of the most popular pages at
dita.xml.org were 1) Who's using DITA, and 2) DITA user groups. She will
post to the e-

mail thread about the mission statement about this. She also raised that
point that DITA adopters are a diverse community, and we might not be able
to agree 

on precisely ranked priorities.

Gershon asked where does "Selling moving to DITA" fall on the list of
proposed priorities? Maybe it is covered under #4, "Implementing DITA." He
reiterated 

that he thought that people needed a lot of help.

Don Day mentioned an earlier article about about "DITA for Managers," which
we found through a Google search. Would we want to add pages to
dita.xml.org 

about business-value justifications? It would take some work to do the
research and figure out what to update.

Kris Eberlein mentioned that one of our primary challenges is to improve
the information architecture and navigation for dita.xml.org, given the
constraints 

imposed by Drupal.

Gershon asked if there was anyway that we could control what goes where on
the Resources page, or change the category to which a resource had been
assigned. 

Should we consider moderating posts?

Kris raided the point that moderating posts would apply also to other
sections of the site; is that a direction that we want to consider?


Action: Kris Eberlein will contact Carol Geyer and see if the order in
which events are listed on the Event page can be reversed. Currently the
oldest (2006) 

events show up first; this is in contrast to how items are listed on the
News page.

Action: Kris Eberlein will contact Carol Geyer and get more information
about whether we can reassign items categorized as resources.

Action: Everyone to post comments about specific sections of the site to
http://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita-adoption/FocusAreaAnalysis

 -- Kristen Eberlein

The document named Minutes, 16 March 2009 (Focus_area
subcommitte_meeting_16_March_2009.txt) has been submitted by Kristen
Eberlein to the DITA Adoption Focus Area SC document repository.

Document Description:


View Document Details:
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/document.php?document_id=31689

Download Document:  
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/31689/Focus_area%20subcommitte_meeting_16_March_2009.txt


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