dita — archive

[Kristen Eberlein]

Help, please! Robert and I are in over our heads in regard to the amount of work. As a TC, let’s talk about ways that the work could be shared over a larger group of people while still maintaining rigorous attention to quality and a consistent voice. Some background information about how previous versions of the DITA spec have been edited: DITA 1.0: Largely written within IBM before donation to OASIS. Michael Priestley and JoAnn Hackos are the editors for the Architectural Specification , and Robert Anderson is the editor of the Language Reference . DITA 1.1: Update to DITA 1.0, same editors. DTA 1.2: Lots of proposals hastily approved, some with serious holes. Major changes required to the architectural content, and work languished for over a year while the TC member tasked with that work struggled with it. Gershon Joseph got the spec source into OASIS SVN (previously not under version control), and I took on the task of getting TC members to edit/revise/develop sections of content. We used OASIS wiki pages to capture review comments. Architectural specification and the element reference combined in a single publication for the first time. Finished work, pushed it out the door – But the spec had some serious flaws, due to several factors: Flawed process for DITA 1.2 proposals; involvement of so many people authoring & editing content; lack of review tools … DITA 1.3: Major process changes: Source moved to GitHub DITAweb selected and used as a review tool New process for selecting what goes into the release put in place (current three-stage process) Robert and I perform all the editing work DITA 2.0: First backwards-incompatible release, which frees us up to rework a lot of content. Ambitious, but we thought we could manage it, given that we know have good processes in place. Takes longer than we think … Best, Kris Kristen James Eberlein Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee Owner, Eberlein Consulting LLC kris@eberleinconsulting.com Skype: kriseberlein; voice: +1 (919) 622-1501