On March 8, Amber Swope and Nancy Harrison of the DITA Adoption Technical Committee met with local DITA practitioners to listen to stories, suggestions, and complaints in reference to their individual journeys of DITA adoption. In attendance were representatives from FiServ, NetApp, Daimler, Viewpoint, and other local companies, and also Keith Schengili-Roberts, Scott Hudson, and Stan Doherty of the DATC.

The Technical Committee was particularly interested in gaps in the DITA specification that could be filled in for the next release. However, the discussion was wide-ranging, including the challenges of SME authoring in DITA, the need to constrain elements for new DITA writers to ease the learning curve, and the restructuring of existing content required before migration. We learned that the Lightweight DITA Committee is making progress on Markdown-to-DITA authoring; most attendees registered their recommendation for the Git flavor of Markdown as the most useful one.

If you missed this session and want to share your opinions, listening sessions will be ongoing, including one that will take place at the DITA North America conference in San Diego on April 25th. You can learn about more upcoming sessions as they’re scheduled at https://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita-adoption/listeningsessions.