Last week I attended Content Management Strategies/DITA N-America, afaik the leading conference in the DITA community. The conference with 300 participants reminded me a lot of my first Drupalcon in Brussels, there are some obvious differences (e.g. most attendees are not programmers but technical writers, the food was as good as the food we got on the Drupal Gov Days) but if you look closer you'll see that the DITA community has a sharing culture much like our own. On Tuesday I attended an informal meetup where we could ask questions to the members of the DITA Oasis committee in which it was brought up that we need to get more people involved in the development of the DITA Open Toolkit. I suggested to organize a code sprint and it seems that already now some of the practices in our community will help bring new initiatives to the DITA community. On Monday I gave a presentation on the work we've done at Pronovix to leverage DITA documentation in community sites built in Drupal. In the presentation I discussed not only how this work will lead to a very interesting DITA capable CMS with a lot of community functionalities, but I also discussed how the DITA and Drupal communities could benefit from a closer integration/collaboration and how Drupal could help to grow the DITA community 5 fold in the next few years. For those who missed my presentation or want to see it again:
- I recorded my presentation and I've uploaded the video at Archive.org
- my slides are available on Slideshare and I've embedded them below.DITA in the Open Source CMS Drupal - Baltimore 2011View more presentations from Kristof Van Tomme
