Revised Minutes for 2 March 2021

TC Meeting - 2 March 2021

11 AM ET open

1. Roll call:

Zoe Lawson

Dawn Stevens

Kris Eberlein

Stan Doherty

Nancy Harrison

Eliot Kimber

Chris Nitchie

Gershon Joseph

Carsten Brennecke

Frank Wegmann

Carlos Evia

Deb Bissantz

Jim Tivy

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

2. Approve minutes from previous business meeting:

Kris Eberlein 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

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

6. Review of DITA 2.0 proposal deadlines

Kris Eberlein: Elliot - remove copy-to?

Eliot Kimber: 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.

Kris Eberlein: ETA?

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

Kris Eberlein: March 15?

Eliot Kimber: Yes

Kris Eberlein: Awesome

Kris Eberlein: Chris Nitchie - I offered to help, can.

Chris Nitchie: can we have a quick call? The word Configuration = DocType shells. needs help.

Eliot Kimber: I didn't realize that.

Chris Nitchie: 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.

Kris Eberlein: I can certainly help some time this weekend.

Chris Nitchie: 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)

Kris Eberlein: 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?

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

Kris Eberlein: Audience:

Who currently participates?

Who (people and org) should participate?

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

Nancy Harrison: 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.

Kris Eberlein: there are a lot of consultants on the team.

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

Zoë fits as an Information Architect working for a company.

TC currently has people representing companies.

Stan, Oracle has been a rep from the beginning.

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

Kris Eberlein: Companies that make XML tools.

Carlos Evia: Universities.

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

Stan Doherty: it's all over the place, but software company.

Kris Eberlein: Deb B. you are in companies that make CCMS.

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

Kris Eberlein: Who should be participating?

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

Nancy Harrison: Benefits - Any organization that creates a significant amounts of content.

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

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

Nancy Harrison: right.

Gershon Joseph: Charter needs to address both.

Kris Eberlein: 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 corollary to Universities, it's Corporations.

Nancy Harrison: And from Elliot, government as well.

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

Kris Eberlein: There are many uses that aren't mentioned

Zoë Lawson: Insurance

Kris Eberlein, Nancy Harrison: Lots of other verticals, medical, health.

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

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

Kris Eberlein: 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)

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

Kris Eberlein: Sure.

In an ideal world what add?

Zoë Lawson: Best practices

??: White papers on ???

Nancy Harrison: an internationalization committee had a best practice white paper.

Kris Eberlein: 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)

Gershon Joseph: 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.

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

Zoë Lawson: some specializations

Nancy Harrison: Who reads this charter? It's not the first thing on a search.

Should this be an exhaustive list? or more general?

Kris Eberlein: 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.

Nancy Harrison: 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.

Chris Nitchie ?: aren't we supposed to keep it vague

Kris Eberlein: 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 might join the TC.

- people who want to know what the committee does.

Dawn Stevens: What is the overlap with the Adoption committee?

Stan Doherty: 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.

Carlos Evia: 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?

Stan Doherty: I agree, everything should be on the table.

Gershon Joseph: The Adoption TC has asked themselves the same questions.

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

Kris Eberlein: It's a good question.

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

Nancy Harrison: 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.

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

Kris Eberlein: 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.

Carlos Evia: Apologies for opening the can of worms.

Kris Eberlein: No, good question.

Gershon Joseph: Most of the original adoption charter is no longer relevant.

Kris Eberlein: 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.

Dawn Stevens: DITA-OT is out of scope.

Kris Eberlein: 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?

Kris Eberlein: don't know, it's gray.

Dawn Stevens: Implementation guides?

Kris Eberlein: Yup, these are gray. Overlap with adoption TC.

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

Deb Bissantz: Formatting is out of scope.

Kris Eberlein: 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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