Looking for a job? Jim Elliot from Mentor Graphics passed along this opening for a Tech Pubs engineer with DITA and XSLT knowhow. Details here: http://ch.tbe.taleo.net/CH08/ats/careers/requisition.jsp?org=MENTOR&cws=1&rid=1023
For our upcoming June 13th meeting, Roger Hadley, Senior Technical Writer and Team Leader at Grass Valley Live, is going to give a short presentation about keyrefs: we’re excited to hear all about this subject because we haven’t started to implement them yet. Feel free to bring your own topics of interest for discussion after the Q&A. And if you’d like to present at the next meeting, go ahead and suggest it in blog comments or email Marya at marya.devoto@jivesoftware.com.
As always, we’ll be providing food, beer, artistically bitter griping about PDF production, and a nice view of Powell’s Books from our fifth-floor break room in the Jive Software building at 915 SW Stark Street.
Note the new schedule in the right pane of this blog: we’re shooting for quarterly meetings, since monthly events apparently require too much of a commitment given the glamorous, fast-paced lives of tech comm professionals.
At our meeting two Wednesdays ago, my colleague Leona Campbell shared her experiences taking an Advanced DITA class, which led into an interesting discussion of what post-basic DITA education means these days. Anecdotally, it seems early adopters of DITA have tended to be self-educated fearless types who are comfortable learning from the spec and reaching out to user groups for help from other highly technical users. DITA workshops and classes, however, often seem to cover the concepts of structured and topic-based authoring, what the DITA OT is, and some simple authoring and conversion tasks: they also tend to have a focus on migration, probably because so many DITA projects start with the problem of moving all the old junk out of whatever format it’s in. Finally, there’s often an evangelical component, because it’s no small thing to stop doing whatever you were doing before, and do something as skills-intensive as DITA instead.
However, as DITA matures, its users are a more diverse crowd with more diverse needs. (For example, all three of us writers at Jive Software inherited an existing DITA implementation rather than spearheading a migration.) In our discussion, we said we’d like to see some classes covering the structure of the toolkit and how it can/should be modified for real life implementations. Some more ideas that were floated:
What would YOU like to learn/wish you had learned from DITA training, versus the school of hard knocks? Feel free to respond here.
After a rousing first meeting of PDX DITA User’s Group last summer, we’ve continued to meet monthly, albeit with small attendance at each of the two subsequent meetings. All three meetings have been eye-opening for us as hosts. We at Jive are the inheritors of a relatively small and minimally managed DITA implementation, so learning about what larger organizations are doing is fascinating and helpful, although (working in a group with only three writers) it sometimes seems that other people’s DITA experiences take place in some alternate universe where there are armies of writers wearing shiny space-age uniforms.
We’d like to get more critical mass to drive this effort forward. PDX has plenty of technical communicators using DITA who can benefit from the groupthink. If you’re one of them, please come on out to an upcoming meeting so you can help drive this in a good direction.
Here are some topics that have come up in these small, informal discussions. We’d love to know which of them you think would make a good enough subject to tempt you to come out. Or, add your own.
Proposed Discussions
Add your topics in comments. We’re going to make a greater effort from here on out to avoid coinciding with STC Willamette Chapter meetings. Our next meeting will be February 29th, from 6:30-8:00, in our office at 915 SW Stark, and will feature Leona Campbell presenting informally on her recent experience attending Advanced DITA Training including DITA 1.2 at Comtech. We’d appreciate a heads-up if you’re coming, and we’ll provide pizza, beer, and a nice view of Powells Books from our 5th floor balcony. (We cannot be responsible for any book-shopping costs incurred by this combination of factors.) Hope to see you here!
Calling all DITA XML users and gurus in the greater Portland area for an initial meetup at the Jive Software building, 915 SW Stark in downtown Portland from 6:30-8:00. Beer and pizza will be provided. We’ll share information about past and current projects and brainstorm agenda for future meetings.
For more information, email Marya DeVoto at marya.devoto@jivesoftware.com.
This blog is for people in Portland, OR and environs who publish technical documentation using DITA XML, or who teach other people how to do that, or who just really love saying DITA. (Some people find that amusing.) If you don’t know what the Darwin Information Typing Architecture and the DITA Standard are, you might start by visiting DITAXML.org.