Groups - DITA TC Meeting Minutes 28 June 2016 uploaded

[Tom Magliery<tom.magliery@justsystems.com>]

        Submitter's message
        Action items:
1. Kris to start a Wiki page for tracking progress of the DITA 1.3 Errata to a 17 October 2016 target date.
2. Robert to set up initial meeting with Keith, Tom, Kris to discuss Committee Note regarding "DITA vs. DITA OT".

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Minutes of the OASIS DITA TC
Tuesday, 28 June 2016
Recorded by Tom Magliery
link to agenda for this meeting:	
https://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita/PreviousAgendas

Regrets: Nancy Harrison, JoAnn Hackos, Amber Swope, Michael Priestly, Joe Storbeck, Chris Nitchie

Standing Business
=================

Approve minutes from previous business meeting:
https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201606/msg00038.html (Nancy Harrison, for 21 June 2016)
Previous minutes:
Motion to approve by Kris, seconded by Don Day, approved by consensus

Subcommittee Reports
====================
None

Business
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1. Action items:
----------------
10 May, Robert and Eliot: some progress, but holding while Eliot on vacation
17 May, Stan and Keith: research completed, now a business agenda item
7 June: 
Michael: (absent)
Kris: completed
Stan: Kris suggests removing as an item for Adoption SC; may be better suited as TC committee note
22 June:
Kris: first two items done
Bob: committee note HTML style sheets done
Michael, Dick: (absent)
Kris,Nancy,Bob: still pending

2. Announcements:
-----------------
Kris: Reminder to all OASIS members/voters to vote on the ballot for OASIS Board of Directors or give your recommendations to the voting rep for your company.


3. New item: Agile/Scrum Adoption Within Standards Development Organizations
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Stan: was at scrum training in Cambridge last week, met with experts, asked them about it. There is not a lot of activity in formal agile methodology inside standards orgs.
Three things come up as challenges: 1. if you have really small committees, 3-4 people, the overhead on formal agile is overkill. If committees are too small, there is no return on investment; 2. The nature of volunteers means you can't predict from week to week (or whatever your interval) who's on board and whether they can commit. Need teams large enough that even if half the team is busy you still have critical mass. 3. The heavy-weight process of these methodologies yields a lot of power if you have very specific goals in mind e.g. "we want to make transparent to everyone our backlog". If it's just operational stuff you may not get the ROI in productivity for the amount of disruption that it causes.
That said, there are some lighter-weight methodologies e.g. Kanban (such as Trello) that can be used; limit them in progress as much as possible so you don't overwhelm your budget so you can get some benefits of Kanban without going into the heavyweight agile. There is a lot more of that in standards organizations.
Keith: All of that reflects my sense of research as well.
Stan: The overhead isn't worth it
Kris: This also mirrors my gut sense as TC chair for 2 years
Kris: Unlike within companies, we may have different viewpoints for WHY we want to support DITA as a standard; may not be unified around hte same goals
Robert: Agreed, in a typical business environment if DITA were produced by a company, a team leader would make decisions on disagreements. But with members from different companies, if we don't have same goals, there isn't a person who can with authority say "no, 5 of you are wrong and 5 of you are right, THIS is our one goal". That difference in goals is the part that made me wonder how this could work out
Kris: As a person who keeps train running it's a cajoling act
Scott: That's what's nice about the Kanban approach, it keeps things running. We've seen organizations where the development team is using scrum yet we use Kanban to keep things organized.
Kris: Thanks to Chris Nitchie for giving us access to Trello for DITA 1.3 work. One thing about Trello, it can be hard to track cards when they're done or deleted. We ran into some problems tracking what we thought were 1.2 errata items. Did these changes make their way into grammar files for 1.3? I wonder what alternative would have better tracking.
Stan: I wonder whether JIRA would have that capability.
Kris: We need to have clear assessment whether the overhead of using JIRA is worth the benefits. In the past we decided it was too much overhead. Need to determine whether that has changed.


4. Continued item: Notes from Adoption TC listening sessions
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Kris: Anyone else had a chance to look at these notes? Anyone with additional comments?
Keith: Kudos to Robert for responding to one of the things already -- his blog posting distinguishing DITA and DITA OT; and to Kris's idea to create a committee note. This is a nice early win as an outcome for those sessions.
Stan: There are some people out there doing really interesting stuff with DITA OT, may be useful to recruit new volunteers from them.
Kris: Stan would you be comfortable adding a slide reminding people that both the TC and OT are volunteer efforts welcoming involvement?
Stan: yes (though note you do need to be a member of oasis for TC)
Robert: Be very careful what's on that slide so it doesn't continue to confuse DITA and DITA OT!
Stan: We will let you have a look at the slide before we use it.


5. Continuing item: DITA 1.3 errata
-----------------------------------
Kris: Had a call with Chet Ensign, it was a good conversation. The resolution is we do NOT need to produce an updated spec that clearly indicates deletions by strike-throughs. We can go ahead with what we want to do which is what we said last week: a clear change log issued in the errata; we can potentially indicate changed portions with @rev attributes and color-coding/marginal notes in PDF and graphics in HTML. Chet was very affirmative about getting a clean new copy of the spec, new catalog files, and doing it in a way that best meets our own user community's needs and is not a drain on TC resources. 
Bob: that's a good outcome.
Kris: Chet was very upfront about errata done previously by other TCs; other specs are sourced in Microsoft Word, single documents, usually small, easier for them to do that kind of thing. He was very respectful of the fact that that's not our situation.

Kris: No new errata items around spec source. Some new items around catalog files (covered later in agenda.)


6. New item: Suggested DITA 1.3 errata schedule
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Kris: Created new schedule for errata by working backwards from a final date of 17 October. This would be done before TCWorld and the other fall events, and would be 10 months after DITA 1.3. Schedule factored in 14 days for OASIS staff work, various reviews, working times, etc. All in all this means we need to have new work on content model generation and SEO done by 29 July.
Kris: The content model work is the big ticket item here. Any thoughts/comments?
Eliot: Looks reasonable, puts a lot of burden on Robert.
Robert: Working on it ...
Kris: Robert, do you want us to move forward with this as our goal schedule?
Robert: Um ... sure. The schedule is sooner than I expected, but ok. I made some progress today, but need a lot more testing yet. A lot of burden is going to be on testing to make sure things look right. Any help would be appreciated.
Kris: What might testing entail?
Robert: Not sure about efficiency. This only showed up when people tried to read the spec. The only way to see problems is to actually read the tables.
Kris: Perhaps also use a tool to see if your experience matches the content models that appear in the tables.
Robert: The changes are "easy", would be looking for assistance with purely "obvious"-looking things like content models that say "zero or more FOO followed by FOO"
Volunteers who spoke up: Deb, Tom, Scott, Eliot
Kris: Sorry Robert about the early date
Robert: No worries, there are good reasons to have it done by then
Kris: General consensus? Objections? [none]
Kris: Okay, I will create a wiki page where we can keep more info and tracking

Keith: To clarify: you mentioned SEO, is that for the spec or the errata or both? I've been able to sort out some best practices. There are some long-term things that would not fit into this schedule
Kris: With the July 29 date this would pertain to the errata. This would be an updated version of the spec in all of its forms. That is the primary thing on the OASIS site. Anything we need to fold into our HTML pages for SEO, e.g. we talked about running Google analytics. That obvoiusly would be code we need to introduce to the HTML pages and work with OASIS to get Google analytics up and running. I believe they were very positive about doing that. So a two-part thing: 1) Long-term post-errata SEO work; and 2) What we want to do and can do in this errata time frame.
Keith: I can help with both SEO and Google analytics. Caution: I can only make recommendations when it comes to some aspects of SEO that may not be doable within time frame.
Kris: Probably it will be more Google analytics in this time frame.
Keith: I will volunteer to do that.


7. New item: More Catalog Errata: Public ID for RNG MathML Module
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Kris: formal items arising from eliot's emails
Eliot: The issue is that there is a module that needs to be included by any custom shells that integrate the MathML module. We had not provided a catalog entry for that public ID. My recommendation is to do that; I suggested a URN for that. Subsequent to that, I realized the entire module could be re-factored to remove the need for it to be referenced.
Kris: Do we need to add any additional information to let people know the URN has been added? Anything other than the errata change list. E.g. do we need the errata spec language to have any information about this?
Eliot: No, I have a separate errata proposal that removes the need for anyone to care about this file. So it's actually a change that doesn't affect anyone.
Kris: What is the resolution? Do we hold this item until next week so I can ensure that missing email is here? Or close this with an action item for Eliot today?
Eliot: Actually there are two different parts to this agenda item. First is the first email to add a URI entry to the catalog for the content. We could vote on that next week. The 2nd is a separate proposal to refactor a file called mathmlDomainProxy.rng. I suggest making it generic so that it works and makes shell creation easier. It involves changing a file rather than adding something new.
Kris: I think we need to look at whether this is a substantive change according to OASIS rules. If it's substantive we can't do this within the context of errata.
Eliot: It's not changing the behaviour of anything, or any normative aspect. Just a change in the mechanics of how a particular aspect of RNG is accommodated in the specific case of MathML.
Kris: Do folks have any questions or preferences about whether we move forward?
Robert: I confess to not knowing all the details, no strong opinion. I trust Eliot (and also the fact that George Bina also likes this change) that this does not seem substantive.
Kris: Ok, we will leave this on the agenda but take care of it next week. Everyone be prepared to revisit it for finality next week.


8. New item: Understanding DITA vs. DITA OT
-------------------------------------------
Kris: This came out of the notes from Adoption SC listening sessions, which spawned email by Tom, a blog posting by Robert, the idea of a committee note by Kris, and several other messages to the list.
Tom: In discussion last week there was a mention of the distinction between "tool" and "standard". This reminded me of the diagrams and analogy that I outlined in my email, which I use when I'm teaching people about structured authoring with XML.
Kris: We've had a number of analogies/metaphors that people use, in email. We've got Robert's new blog piece. We have feedback from Nancy. We have email from Don suggesting another way of explaining things.
Kris: Should we write a committee note or just all point to Robert's blog piece?
Robert: I obviously was not speaking with the voice of the TC. I would like the idea of a committee note to make it more official than my own. I also think the OASIS position may be slightly different than mine.
Scott: A committee note might provide better visibility.
Kris: Any volunteers?
Robert: happy to work on it. Tom also. Kris also. Keith also.
Keith: To be clear, what is our audience? Robert's blog posting is clearly aimed at people unclear on the concept. E.g. our committee note about "what's new in DITA 1.3" is clearly aimed at developers.
Kris: I think this is clearly aimed at a broader audience.
Robert: What is scope we want to cover?
Kris: My personal take is this should be limited to DITA TC vs. DITA OT, not to tackle broader issues of an ecosystem. I suggest we have a call to outline this. If we can't do that within one call we have a problem!
Keith: Agree that is a reasonable idea.
Robert: Will set up the call for Wednesday.

Meeting adjourned 12pm ET, 9am PT.
        
-- Mr. Tom Magliery

Document Name: DITA TC Meeting Minutes 28 June 2016

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Description
DITA TC Meeting Minutes 28 June 2016
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Submitter: Mr. Tom Magliery
Group: OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) TC
Folder: Meeting Notes
Date submitted: 2016-06-29 15:27:12