PRONOVIX

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.

This is a presentation that I gave at the Drupal Developer Days, on 6 February 2011. It's meant as an introduction to single sourcing. It contains the results of the documentation questionnaire we ran.

What would the ideal documentation system for a community driven project like Drupal look like?

From the outside Drupal is perceived as a well documented project, and several people choose to work with Drupal because of this. On the inside however, a lot of people complain about the documentation. What's the reason and the meaning of these differences in perception?

In this video I explain how an organization can use a 3-step architecture to involve all the stakeholders of the production process in the development of DITA documentation. The architecture adds a community portal both upstream and downstream of the documentation team. The upstream and downstream portals can plug into the existing tools and processes of the documentation team through the use of DITA documentation topics and maps.

As a result more people are involved in the process without having to buy additional licenses of (expensive) specialized XML editors and/or CMS's.

Next video in the DITA documentation progress report series in which I demonstrate the results of the work of my colleagues Denes, Tamas and Kornel.

In this video you'll see:

• A prototype of the documentation client and server that can be used for centralized documentation similar to how the localization server works.
• Poorman's DITA: A CCK form with the most important elements from the DITA topics (currently tasks and concepts) that is transformed into valid DITA XML

In this video I demonstrate the results of the work of my colleagues Denes and Tamas, who built a first implementation of a Drupal site that takes DITA topics and let's you add them in a mindmap interface to a DITAmap and than export them using the DITA Open Toolkit.

This is a follow up on the blog posts I published a month ago: one with an interface mockup and the other post with a mindmap to ditamap conversion proposal.