Attendees for 2 March 2021 TC call

From: Zoe Lawson
Sent: Tuesday, March 2, 2021 12:08 PM
To: Kristen James Eberlein <kris@eberleinconsulting.com>; Nancy Harrison <nharrison@infobridge-solutions.com>
Subject: Rough minutes for 2 March 2021

Greetings!

I'm getting these out just so they're available for consolidating notes, and to save them not on my work computer.

FYI, I missed the roll call.

ZoÃ

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TC Meeting - 2 March 2021

11 AM ET open

1. Roll call: <I missed>

Regrets: Robert Anderson, Kieth S-R, Eric Sirois, Scott Hudson

2. Approve minutes from previous business meeting:

KE moves to approve. Dawn seconds. Objections? none

Minutes approved as submitted.

3. Action items

We have a draft of the charter and want to brainstorm later, otherwise, no updates.

4. Check-in: How are people doing in this difficult time? How is your state/country doing?

No business discussed

5. Announcements

ZoÃ - leaving Casenet, starting with Synopsis. Membership status may be a little confused until everything gets sorted.

6. Review of DITA 2.0 proposal deadlines

KE: Elliot - remove copy-to?

EK: Started on it this weekend and made progress. Not sure he'll make progress this week as he has to study and take an examp for a certification.

KE: ETA?

EK: If not next week, the week after. Two weeks from now

KE: March 15?

EK: Yes

KE: Awesome

KE: Chris Nitchie - I offered to help, can.

CN: can we have a quick call? ÂThe word Configuration = DocType shells. needs help.

EK: I didn't realize that.

CN: Yes, there's a section on configuration that only talks about DocType shells. And the language on constraints is the language I want to use.

KE: I can certainly help some time this weekend.

CN: Should work.

8. Continuing: TC charter

Starting point for a brainstorm

https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/202103/msg00005.html (Eberlein, 02 March 2021)

Resources about the charter

https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/202103/msg00007.html (Eberlein, 02 March 2021)

partial draft TC charter

https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/202103/msg00004.html (Harrison, 02 March 2021)

KE: Nancy and I overlapped a bit. A freeform brainstorm should help.

Initially discussed on revising existing charter.

Then others were going to produce a draft.

But if we just brainstorm (not write) for the key areas, potentially most fruitful way to move forward.

Nancy, as we do this, are there particular ideas?

Do you think it would be helpful to have a "whiteboard" or sound only?

(ZoÃ - I'm taking notes, so audio only please. However, Kris eventually shared her screen where she was taking notes.)

KE: Audience:

Who currently participates

Who (people and org) should participates

DS: I represent the Consulting community. People who advise other on use and architecture of DITA.

NH: Writers of other specifications (leftover from old charter - need to discuss; have others taken DITA as a starting point)

XML tools makers - ???

???

Information developers and architects - fall under consulting community.

KE: there are a lot of consultants on the team.

We have vendors that produce XML or Products (IXIA Soft or Jim Tivy on BlueStream)

ZoÃ fits as an Information Architect working for a company.

TC currently has people representing companies.

Stan, Oracle has been a rep from the beginning.

SD: Oracle is all over the place. Content (tool) engineers, Manager,

KE: Companies that make XML tools.

CE: Universities.

KE: Thank you Carlos. But what is Oracle's vertical.

SD: its all over the place, but software company.

KE: Deb B. you are in companies that make CCMS.

DB: Yes, and consultants. Deb considers herself a writer, user of the spec.

KE: Who should be participating?

Who does participate is a small subset of those who benefit.

NH: Benefits - Any organization that creates a signifigant amounts of content.

Need to distinguish between indirect audience (those who benefit) vs primary (read the spec)

DS: Who is the audience, the TC, or people who take the output.

NH: right.

GJ: Charter needs to address both.

KE: Let's try to hit both. We can target who participates. Audience = who would be participating. What are the companies that currently benefit a lot?

If we do a corrollary to Universities, it's Corporations.

NH: And from Elliot, government as well.

EK: yes, and Feds are using more than we realize.

KE: There are many uses that aren't mentioned

ZL: Insurance

KE, NH: Lots of other verticals, medical, health.

FW: Isn't that covered by Information Architectures? Different verticals need structured information.

NH: Is this audience or scope? Difficult to draw the line.

KE: And that's why a brainstorm would be good. Let's identify the questions and difficulties.

Deliverables, what work does the TC produces.

We develop and maintain the DITA Specification.

But what else...

Committee notes.

Webinars.

Conference presentations.

OASIS also recommends other things, such as tutorials

(Note in chat from Dawn:

Membership: Commercial, government, and education entities that seek to influence the DITA standard to meet the needs of the information products they produce

Consultants representing the information development needs of non-member clients)

NH: Do we want to talk about migration information? yes it's a committeee note, but is it more specific?

KE: Sure.

In an ideal world what add?

ZLL: Best practices

??: White papers on ???

NH: an internaltionalizeion committee had a best practice white paper.

KE: What would white papers/committee notes cover?

Specification previews (Intro to LW DITA, Why 3 editions of 1.3)

others?

At different times discussed should some information in Spec (DTDs, constraints) into some other document? (Tutorial, whitepaper)

GJ: What about reference content? Examples of how to do stuff. Learning subcommittee content becomes an example? LWDITA, instead of a full spec, it's a spinoff. "If you want to do MarkDown, here's the DITA equivalent.

KE: Some of our work goes into GitHub (style sheets, RNG to DTD XSD thing/converter, specializations that have been removed from the spec)

ZLL: some specializations

NH: WHo reads this charter? It's not the first thing on a search.

Should this be an exhaustive list? or more general?

KE: Chet has advised us to be general in the charter so we don't have to keep updating it.

Let's brain dump and get questions.

NH: Should the list of deliverables be explicit or general (aspirational)

If it's a 'we'd like to" need to make it clear that what we might create isn't a definite to-do list.

CN ?: aren't we supposed to keep it vague

KE: Yes.

Keep a public to-do list separate from the charter.

This Brainstorm will help us figure out how to make sure we don't box ourselves in with a too restrictive charter.

The Charter audience

- people who mjight join the TC.

- people who want to know what the committee does.

DS: What is the overlap with the Adoption committee?

SD: We're working on our own charter, and we're having similar questions.

Are we Use Cases?

Are we business adoption?

Looking to get the charter on their questions.

CE: Is the Adoption committee still necessary? (Still loves all the members, but worth asking.)

Have trouble explaining why there are two committees.

Is all the Administration of it all worth it?

SD: I agree, everything should be on the table.

GJ: The Adoption TC has asked themselves the same questions.

DOn't have an answer, but we've asked the question.

KE: It's a good question.

GJ: DITA is fairly well adopeted today, so what's the role now that adoption is good. Is it retention? Is it something else?

NH: Historical - the idea was to appeal to members who didn't want to be part of the technical TC.

No longer clear that it has to be separate.

GJ: Yes, that was an idea back when started. It never materialized, as non-technical folks rarely could get budgets to join. (co-founder)

KE: Also a co-founder. If I knew then what I know now, probably wouldn't have done it. dita.xml.org is supposed to be maintained by the committee, went to the

adoption committee, and it's no longer as vibrant.

Adoption committee created some articles that were more technical, but not as technical as the DITA TC wanted, and it was weird.

CE: Apologies for opening the can of worms.

KE: No, good question.

GJ: Most of the original adoption charter is no longer relavent.

KE: Let's move on to Scope.

What is in and what is out of scope. (OASIS, please focus on "what" not "how')

There is overlap.

Have consensus that out of scope....we don't rate products, companies, etc. on DITA compliance.

DS: DITA-OT is out of scope.

KE: I'm a little less clear about what OASIS wants in the scope information. Any thoughts?

Frank Carsten: Is learning material? Tutorials? in or out of scope?

KE: don't know, it's gray.

DS: Implementation guides?

KE: Yup, these rae gray. Overlap with adoption TC.

WE've consitantly said the spec is for implementers of dita, not a learning resource, not a how-to guide. Doesn't mean we couldn't.

DB: Formatting is out of scope.

KE: But we have formatting conventions at the end of the spec. There's content and structure on one side, and formatting on the other.

At 1 minute from top of hour.

Let's think forward, keep chatting on email, to help the folks drafting the charter.

Thanks!

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