Folks,
As with the DocBook SubCommittee for Publishers,
the OASIS DocBook Technical Committee has authorized the
formation of subcommittees for the purpose of creating
official
customization layers to support the needs of various
domains. These
customizations are officially "DocBook variants",
but also drive
requirements back to core DocBook.
We have a tremendous opportunity to support the future of
education with
the formation of a DocBook SubCommittee for eLearning.
The charter for this SC may include support for:
- Enabling creation of Online Learning and Technical
Training
- SCORM-compliant output
- Other forms of educational publications (such as
textbooks)
The charter will NOT include support for:
- layout-intensive publishing
The first step is to gather interested parties via the
docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org
<mailto:docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org>
list and from industry contacts.
With three or more interested parties, the following
guideline has been established at OASIS:
"If you're planning on starting up a
subcommittee, there's no need to
create a discussion list -- typically that's done to tighten
up scope,
etc. before submitting a charter for a new Technical
Committee.
All that's necessary to get started is to organize the
respective
interested parties, put together a statement of work, and
submit it to
the TC for approval. And someone needs to volunteer to take
on the role
of chair. Of course all participants need to be OASIS
members."
I see this as a tremendous opportunity for those in the
DocBook community who are
interested in producing eLearning content and for those
already using
DocBook for technical publications, but some other solution
for
education content. Adopters will also be able to take
advantage of the
robust tool and community support that DocBook already
enjoys. It's also
a tremendous opportunity for DocBook to garner additional
industry adoption.
In fact, an enterprising DocBook user has already donated a
DocBook to
SCORM open source project (docbook2scorm) on Google Code,
which has had
730 downloads to date. This demonstrates a strong interest
in using
DocBook for eLearning, even though DocBook currently does
not provide
explicit support for it!
The subcommittee effort would provide additional content
models as part
of the official DocBook variant to provide a much more rich
eLearning
experience.
Please let me know if you are interested in participating in
this effort.
Thanks and best regards,
--Scott
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