What's Impeding DITA Adoption

["Tony Self" <tself@hyperwrite.com>]

Greetings colleagues

Today I went to add a post to my very rarely updated Blog on DITA.xml.org,
but my own post on my own blog got blocked by the spam filter. Although the
post deals with DITA adoption generally (ie, not DITA for Help adoption
specifically), I thought I'd not waste the effort in writing the post by
sharing it here. It dovetails a little into our discussions with Neil Perlin
and Alan Houser at the last meeting.

There have been many discussions within OASIS DITA committees about
discovering (and removing) the impediments to DITA adoption. It's probably
fair to say that the discussions have discovered there are many roadblocks,
but so far haven't resulted in clear ways to remove them.

This morning I read a throught-provoking article entitled "Open Source
Needed to Save Democracy" (at
http://www.zdnet.com.au/open-source-needed-to-save-democracy-339329909.htm?o
cid=nl_TNB_19012012_fea_8) by Stilgherrian. Pondering the question of why
open source isn't as successful as it ought to be, the author quoted Bruce
Perens, of Open Source Definition, who believes many open-source developers
have an attitude problem.

"Let's face it; most of us don't even like users. We call them 'lusers'. We
make the software for ourselves and the other developers. Why should we like
them?"

I wonder whether one of the reasons that DITA is not as successful as it
deserves to be is that those of us on the TC might be making the standard
for ourselves, rather than for the users, technical communicators. One
common complaint from the users is that DITA is too complex. Maybe we can't
see that complexity because we don't believe it to be true?


Regards

Tony Self