Re: [dita-lightweight-dita] My intro for the list

["Jang F.M. Graat" <jang@jang.nl>]

Hello everyone,

I am (one of the) philosopher(s) of the group. I have studied Psychology and Philosophy (plus some Physics) before embarking on a fast-track career in the high-tech computer industry. I have always been drawn to the newer-than-new, with a keen eye on the usefulness of technologies - which very often comes from unexpected corners.

In my professional career, I have spent more than 25 years (of which 20 as a self-employed consultant) writing manuals, creating course materials and delivering training courses in a wide variety of industries all over the globe. In the past years, my work has evolved to programming all kinds of solutions to make tech writing more efficient, ranging from small utilities in FrameMaker to full-blown custom component content management systems (adding another C to the acronym here). Currently (if the paid work does not eat up all my time) I am working on a new paradigm in tech writing, where there may be thousands of topics but no table of contents or maps.

I embraced DITA when I first saw it but have yet to get a true paid DITA project with real customers, as the hurdles for the adoption of DITA are still too high for most small and medium sized companies who are not working in the software development domain. Writing manuals using high-tech software concepts is simply a couple of bridges too far for those clients. Nevertheless, I have gotten several small companies into a DITA-inspired, minimized structure using FrameMaker and my own set of scripts that make it work in much the same way the DITA OT does, without all the commandline stuff that would scare the hell out of those poor authors.

Apart from the size of the vocabulary in lightweight DITA, I am most interested in making lw-DITA sellable through a concise, clear introduction and through tooling that does away with all the geekiness that still shows around anything to do with DITA and the DITA OT at the moment. Lightweight DITA, which in my view should probably be called DITA-lite (for a variety of reasons I will go into at a later stage), should be as daunting as a newborn kitten. Even though you might know it may well grow into a powerful lion, you simply want to hold and cuddle it while it is still young. That might in fact be a much better logo for DITA-lite than the finch, which does not have a lot of cuddliness about it.

So, I will be concentrating on clear concepts, ease of use and options for marketing DITA-lite. I would love to see it becoming a technology that all my clients would love to use.

Kind regards

Jang

JANG Communication
Technical Documentation Specialist
Amsterdam - Netherlands
Cell +31 6 4685 4996
http://www.jang.nl

On 17 Sep 2014, at 02:33, Michael Priestley <mpriestl@ca.ibm.com> wrote:

> As we discussed in the meeting yesterday, I'm kicking off a round of intros so we can all get to know each other a little better. 
> 
> I've been with DITA since day 1, and was the co-editor of the DITA 1.0 and 1.1 specification. I'm excited about lightweight DITA because it gives us a chance to apply the lessons we've learned with full DITA in crafting a high-functioning but lightweight architectural subset. 
> 
> My current role at IBM is one of content technology strategist, with a scope that lets me influence (but not necessarily direct) technology development across many different content development and delivery organizations, with both internal and external audiences. Lightweight DITA is a part of every content technology strategy deck I put together in IBM. It's a core piece of the architecture we need to allow content to be truly portable, across systems, skill sets, and formats. 
> 
> The highest priority scenarios I'm focusing on for IBM use (with help from other IBMers) are: 
> 
> - marketing content and HTML5 mappings 
> - training content and EPUB mappings 
> - developer content and both markdown and HTML5 mappings 
> 
> Michael Priestley, Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM)
> Enterprise Content Technology Strategist
> mpriestl@ca.ibm.com
> http://dita.xml.org/blog/michael-priestley