Lateral Thinking - Cloning the DHSC

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

Greetings colleagues

For those of you not at the last meeting of the DITA Help Subcommittee, one
of the interesting discussions we had related to how to progress the DITA
Help Technologies Guide. You may recall that a change at the OASIS level
moved the responsibility for publishing whitepapers and the like to Adoption
committees. As a subcommittee of the DITA Technical Committee, we are
therefore unable to "officially" publish the DHTG.

Some lateral thinking resulted in an innovative idea: what if we clone the
DHSC as a subcommittee of the DITA Adoption TC? This would basically involve
setting up a duplicate of ourselves. We would then run joint meetings, with
the first part of the meeting covering spec issues (the domain of the DITA
TC), and the second part covering adoption issues (the domain of the DITA
Adoption TC). Ideally, everyone involved in the DITA TC subcommittee would
join the "parallel universe" Adoption TC subcommittee. This would mean that
anyone interested would have to join the Adoption TC first; there's no cost
to this, of course.

Everyone at the meeting agreed to pursue this idea, mainly because it
sounded a bit crazy! If it works, it would mean that we can expand our aims
of guiding people towards best practice in using DITA for Help, but still
continue our role in recommending changes to the standard for 1.3 to better
accommodate Help implementations.

What does everyone think?

Regards

Tony Self