At the May meeting of the Boston DITA Users Group, John Hunt of IBM described the work of the DITA subcommittee for learning and training content specialization.

The goal of the subcommittee is one or more new information types for learning content, at the same level as the current three main types, concept, task, and reference, plus a new map domain to assemble the content as learning objects suitable for processing as deliverables for learning management systems (LMS).

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The conference finished off with a number of DITA case studies, from BusinessObjects, RIM, and PTC.

I highly recommend Larissa Sliwinsky's "Real-World DITA" case study on usage at Business Objects (ppt available from the STC session materials site). The business driver was customer complaints about lack of information, out-of-date information: as someone with a background in user assistance, it always makes me feel warm and fuzzy when someone chooses DITA to improve their customer experience/information quality, instead of focusing solely on its reuse benefits.

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Day 3 kicked off with the DITA TC meeting, phoning in from my hotel room - we completed our disposition of features for 1.2 versus 1.3, and approved the creation of a new Semiconductor subcommittee, led by Bob Beims of Freescale. I know this has been in the makings for quite some time, kudos to Bob for pulling it together.

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A great opening keynote from honorary fellow Simon Singh, for his work on documentaries and books such as Fermat's Last Theorem.  Some of the elements that stuck: the importance of storytelling, the importance of trust between the filmmaker and the subject, and the line between simplifying materials for general consumption versus distorting footage to misrepresent opinions.

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Precis: weather nice, vendors many, Adobe resurgent, technical writers focus on technology, architecture, globalization, perhaps a little DITA here and there.

Weather: sunny, windy, hot. Got the chance to wander the sculpture garden after registering, also stuck my head in on Bernard Aschwanden's session on DITA XML and said hi, along with Robert Anderson, my co-presenter (the lead architect of the DITA Open Toolkit).

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