Groups - DITA TC Meeting Minutes 17 May 2016 uploaded

[Nancy Harrison<nharrison@infobridge-solutions.com>]

        Submitter's message
        ActionItems:
1. Bob and Nancy will take a look at the now-available template for the 1.3 errata document.
2. Stan, Keith, and Scott will investigate Agile development methodologies as they've been used in developing standards, with an eye to making recommendations about which parts might be applicable to the TC's work. In particular, Scott will contact Chet about the status of OASIS's Jira tools; Stan and Keith will focus on broad outlines of Agile methods.

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Minutes of the OASIS DITA TC
Tuesday,  17 May 2016
Recorded by Nancy Harrison
link to agenda for this meeting:	
https://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita/PreviousAgendas


Regrets:   none


Standing Business
=================
Approve minutes from previous business meeting:
https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201605/msg00016.html (Dick Hamilton, for 10 May 2016) 
Proposed by Kris, seconded by Nancy, approved by TC

Subcommittee  Reports
	none 

Announcements
    	none

Business
========
1. Action items
    10 May 2016:
        Robert and Eliot: Schedule meeting to start work on content model generation (Language Reference topics)
[no update]
        Bob and Nancy: Schedule meeting to start work on builds and style sheet changes needed for 1.3 errata; include Kris
[no update]
        Kris: Give Joe Storbeck admin privileges in DITAweb (COMPLETED)
        Kris: Provide Joe Storbeck an orientation to DITAweb 
[not yet] 

2. Announcements:
    New members: None 


3. Continuing item: DITA 1.3 errata
    https://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita/DITA%201.3%20Errata
    Team members:
        Editors: Robert Anderson and Kris Eberlein
        Style sheets: Bob Thomas
        Build: Nancy Harrison
        Reviews: Joe Storbeck
        SEO: Keith Schengli-Roberts 
    Work items:
        Set up @rev for errata; work errata items related to source (completed to date)
        Catalog files
        Correct content model topics
        Style sheets
        Build process
        Search engine optimization 
Kris; there's now a template available for 1.3 errata; Bob and Nancy need to look at the template
ActionItem; Bob and Nancy will take a look at the now-available template for the 1.3 errata document.


4. Continuing item: Work on committee notes
    Update to "Why Three Editions"
    "Upgrading to DITA 1.3" 
A meeting has been scheduled for Weds 5/18 at 1pm ET to discuss this. (Robert, Kris, 
Nancy, Amber)
Kris; we have a new template; the title is a bit ugly, in that it includes the string 'Version 1.0' as part of the official title.  We need to see if we can get rid of the 'Version 1.0' string. Joe's first work on DITAWeb may be more for the upcoming committee note than for the errata...
Joe; OK



5. New item: DITA TC in Agile?
    https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201604/msg00054.html (Doherty, 27 April 2016) 
Stan gave overview; I've been noticing how prolific Agile has become, U.S. DOD projects, e.g., all require Agile scrum.  So, should we be moving to this methodology?  One approach is to organize a backlog of prioritized work items, e.g. stuff for errata, Lightweight DITA (LD), committee notes, etc., then leaders break it down into digestible chunks; 2 working teams, each self-organizaing; they're there to handle whatever is in the backlog. The teams work in recurring intervals (sprints) and people meet regularly, look at schedules, and commit to small pieces.  You don't deliver everything you work on, but it's done in incremental, highly visible, self-organizing groups.   My suggestion was in response to Kris's cry for help in organizing and managing our work.
- Scott; would we have the spec be considered an epic? (in Agile terminology)
- Stan; it might be; depending on situation, we might have many epics or just a few. how parallel or serial, it gets organized, helps to drive its definition.  'a scrum is what you make of it'
- Scott; our SCs are kind of scrum teams,
- Stan; yeah
- Kris; I'd be interested in learning where Agile has been successful in volunteer situations, especially in standards work.
- Robert; we use Agile in my work team and it works well, but I've been skeptical on how it would work in volunteer situations; so I wonder how that would play out.  Another thing that makes standards work peculiar is that we all have related but not idential goals; we all have different priorities for what's in the backlog.
- Stan; good point; team in gen'l can provide feedback on stuff, but you need one or more persons in the role of project owner; they set the priorities, it's not up for a vote. that's different from our operating mode.
- Kris; I'm  always interested in something that would let the TC work more efficiently and guarantee its health and well being.
- Robert; I like what we did in 1.3 with our backlog (Trello), with folks coming with proposal; TC took on role of 'customer'.
- Kris; I don't know if we could have 1 or 2 people be that voice; we're really bound to operate by Robert's rules of order. we've worked towards consensus. reality is there is no one customer; we each have different constituencies.
- Scott; I agree; to have one single owner would bias what gets worked on.
- Stan; I didn't look at any other standards orgs to see if they do this; maybe ACM, or ISO. maybe Chet at OASIS would know. it's surrounding us; but it's not visible in other committees, if they're using it.
- Kris; will anyone reach out to Chet or other folks to do some research?.
- Eliot; I won't volunteer, but apropos of this, I was at a different standards meeting (W3C) last week, they were definitely not using Agile.
- Amber; One of my clients, the Sustainability Accounting Board, is very successfully using Agile.  They are a small org and not dependent on volunteer membership, but working on a standard.  It keeps evolutions of standards moving at regular pace.
- Kris; it would be very interesting to find out if there are particular aspects of their standard working for them in their use of Agile.
- Don; did a search, came up with XDI standard editors.
- Kris; do we have volunteers?
- Stan, I'll do it, but only with someone else?
- Keith; I'll  volunteer; and just btw, W3C has been criticized for not being Agile enough; it takes too long to issue standards, and it has a difficult conflict resolution method.
- Eliot; I'd definitely not recommend them as a model.
- Kris; [review of our method] I don't have a high level of experience with Agile; I don't really know what we could do to incorporate some, but not all, of it.
- Robert; we've been using Agile for 10 years; I've heard many people say 'there's only one right way to do Agile', but I've seen a lot of different ways to do it, so it's not one right thing, but a collection of methodologies.
- Stan; I agree
- Kris; what aspect might be good for us?  we could have more formal backlogs, and incorporate time in each meeting for looking at them.
- Eliot; our use of Trello was pretty close to Agile.
- Kris; and all our work is conducted in a transparent fashion, which is a piece of Agile.
- Chris; because we meet weekly, we have a built-in scrum. It would be helpful if OASIS provided us with a JIRA.
- Kris; they have one; we can use it. Can someone look into our using JIRA at OASIS?
- Stan; be glad to do that as part of Keith and my work.
- Kris; I looked at Jira at one point, to report changes, but I thought it would be more time-consuming than using a spreadsheet.
- Stan; the nice thing about Jira is that it's public and real-time.
- Kris; it would be great to check it out; when I checked, the way that OASIS had set it up made it unusable. it would be great to have a better bug-tracking system
- Scott; I'd be happy to help out with Jira too; we use that here.
- Kris; Scott, can you contact Chet and look at it? Stan and Keith can focus more broadly.
ActionItem: Stan, Keith, and Scott will investigate Agile development methodologies as they've been used in developing standards, with an eye to making recommendations about which parts might be applicable to the TC's work. In particular, Scott will contact Chet about the status of OASIS's Jira tools; Stan and Keith will focus on broad outlines of Agile methods.



6. New item: DITA 2.0 discussion
    What deprecated elements need to be removed?
        https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201605/msg00019.html (Eberlein, 17 May 2016) 
- Kris; any volunteers for things to remove?
- Jang; I'd remove entire highlighing domain, because it's formatting, not semantic.
- Scott; I'd second that, I'm always taking it out for clients.  Maybe we could keep subscript and superscript.
- Keith; yeah, they're needed in electrical engineering work, but would be happy to remove the rest of them.
- Nancy; and semiconductors use either the strikethrough or overbar semantically as well.
- Kris; I almost always remove them, but can't do it with clients that use them in abundance.
- Don; I'll add that if you take them away, there will be massive tag abuse; folks will use whatever elements provide the formatting they expect.
- Scott; we could borrow the 'emphasis' tag from DocBook...
- Don; why not rename bold and italic to 'strong' and 'emphasis'. 
- Kris; how is that different from 'b' and 'i'?
- Don; for people trained that way, its  an important distinction; in HTML5, there was an interesting discussion on this.
- Amber; I've seen lots of folks want just one emphasis tag; might not be an element we would universally use, but lots of folks want it.
- Robert; when audience isn't writers (developers) they don't have simple elements.
- Kris; and we really need to consider compatibility with LD for 2.0.  Even though we say   2.0 isn't backwards compatible, we also say it will minimize disruption, and we'll provide very clear instructions for how to move to it.
- Keith; but that's like the tail wagging the dog... limiting ourselves by LD is a bit premature; we oculd head over to LD and make the suggestion there.
- Robert; LD represents more of the non-writer approach, so they see a need for this.
we need to keep in mind their different audiences.
- Jang; as long as LD doesn't introduce elements that can't be mapped to 2.0, shouldn't be a problem. 
- Robert; goal of LD has been to be a subset of DITA
- Bob; if DITA was purely a tech. comm. standard, then I'd say get rid of highlighting, but it's no longer that; we could separate the highlighting domain into b/i and the rest
- Kris; what was the reason for the highlighting domain?
- Robert; arguments when DITA was first designed over whether we should use other terms - strong, emphasis, etc - argument was to go with widespread HTML as it alreay existed
- Don; other necessity, if you look on icon bar, B/i are alredy there, so it was to use a function that was already there. It still maps to a base function in every editor, so I woulnd't get rid of it.
Robert and it bacame a domain because we knew not every one would want them.
- Don; Michael was one of those who said use of a domain was less harmful than a wrong base domain.
- Kris; I agree with that. 
- Robert; also, Michael always wanted to reach out beyond tech. comm. for DITA.
- Don; design goal was to maintain as much compatibility with HTML as possible.
- Kris; we need to include as a guiding principle for 2.0; attention to the breadth of communities that are now and will be using DITA.  What about besides highlighting domain?
- Robert; we should be talking about other good ideas.
- Eliot; what about XNAL?  I've never seen a use of it.
- Robert; IBM uses it, but I've never been a fan of it; we use it to generate user forms.
- Kris; I think it is in a number of implementations, but don't know whether people use it.
- Nancy; I think if we did it now, we'd do it like SVG
- Robert; IBM wanted some of it, but not most; IBM would have been happy with just a bit of it; Chris Kravogel said 'there's a standard, so we should use it as is'
- Don; what is it in DITA?
- Robert; it's only in bookmap.
- Kris; I have clients who want it in their topics. for 2.0, there are different levels of what we can do;  we can ship this domain in a shell or not, etc.
- Robert; we could come up with an alternative.
- Kris; most customers can use XNAL efficiently.
- Nancy; what about L&T1 (as opposed to L&T2)
- Eliot; I've considered moving L&T to its own spec, it's both large enough and separate/self-contained enough
[agreement by Kris, Robert]
- Eliot; 1.3 gives a precedent for modularizing things
- Stan; this would fit well with Agile methodology
- Scott; long-term if we can come up with market-driven specs, other folks might get involved.
- Robert; in 1.1 time-frame, thought was that industry-specific groups should form specializations within their industry; we shouldn't own these things. 
- Don; community specific reqs always to the size of the spec. I'd make the separation of arch (just maps and ditaval) and everything else falls into application side of things.

[to be continued]



12:00PM PM  ET Close 





        
-- Ms. Nancy Harrison

Document Name: DITA TC Meeting Minutes 17 May 2016

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Submitter: Ms. Nancy Harrison
Group: OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) TC
Folder: Meeting Notes
Date submitted: 2016-05-19 17:47:49