At the Boston DITA Users meeting for March, Bob Doyle, his son Derek, and David Pearson presented the new DITA Users website, in development since the first of January. (http://www.ditausers.org)

Bob described his background as a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Harvard in the 1960's who turned to inventing things like 6 electronic games for Parker Brothers, including the best-selling game Merlin. He was the 11th certified developer for Apple Macintosh and wrote the first desktop publishing program, MacPublisher, in 1984.

For the last few years, Bob has been very interested in content management, editing the highly rated CMS Review and a half-dozen companion websites and writing regular columns for EContent Magazine. With Bob Boiko, Tony Byrne, Frank Gilbane, and Ann Rockley, he founded the CM Professionals community of practice in 2004. He recently wrote an invited article on Selecting a CMS for STC Intercom and he handed out copies of the March issue.

Bob described the long history of structured writing from SGML, through XML, and then to DITA, a subset of XML with standard DTDs and XSLT transfomrs that let writers concentrate on creating the topic-based content. He described the historical origins of Information Typing, work done by Bob Horn, the founder of our hosts, Information Mapping. Bob Horn was also at Harvard in the 1960's. Developing ideas about "chunking" content, Horn called the chunks Information Blocks and assembled them into Information Maps. These concepts and even he terms were clearly inspiration for DITA.

Another idea behind modern documentation as broken into small tasks came from John Carroll, who called his technique Minimalism.  Bob Horn and John Carroll were both influenced by work on cognitive science and learning theory at Harvard by Jerome Kagan, Jerome Bruner, George Miller, and B.F. Skinner, and so, he says, was Bob Doyle.

Bob waved a copy of JoAnn Hackos' latest book, Information Development, where principes of Minimalism and topic-based structured writing are at the core of Hackos'  training courses.

Bob has written several articles on structured content and DITA for EContent and keynoted Kay Ethier's Framemaker 2006 conference with a talk on Framemaker and DITA.
(http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/ArticleIndex.aspx?ContextSubtypeID=71)

Bob joined OASIS to observe some of the technical committee work on DITA and to contribute to the DITA focus area there, including the Boston Group page and a blog  (http://dita.xml.org/boston/ and http://dita.xml.org/blog/1008).

The specific idea of the DITA Users website grew out of the Boston User Group plans to have a workshop at this March meeting to install the DITA Open Toolkit on members' laptops. Not many members wanted to get involved with the technology at that level even if the hard work was done for them!

Bob and Derek had integrated the DITA OT into the CMS behind the old CM Pros website (http://www.cmprosold.org), especially for use by the CM Pros DITA Community (http://www.cmpros.org/communities/topical/dita/) whose mission was "To encourage structured authoring in the wider CM Pros community in general and on the CM Pros website in particular. This community will provide a technical resource for members who want to learn XML authoring and editing, specifically using the new DITA XML initiative from OASIS."

[CM Pros new website has dropped most of the technology initiatives developed by Bob. The new DITA Users site provides him a lot more flexibility.]

But integrating the DITA OT is not enough. DITA source files can be created by any editor, like the Xinha editor in Bob's skyBuilders timeLines CMS, but what technical writers are looking for is a WYSIWYG editor that hides the XML completely.

Nancy Harrison suggested we approach DITA Storm (http://www.ditastorm) about integrating their new browser-based DITA editor. Alex Korezin gave Bob permission to integrate DITA Storm, which was accomplished in late January. Bob showed his development road map (http://www.ditausers.org/about_us/road_map/)

Jen Linton of Comtech Services gave approval to put the docset example files from her Introduction to DITA up on the site. Two other examples were drawn from IBM alphaworks and the DITA Open Toolkit at SourceForge. Bob is hoping for more examples, including a multilingual localized docset.

He described the original website mission as supporting 1) Writing, 2) Collaborating, and 3) Publishing. But Bob decided to de-emphasize collaboration, which he expects may come in time between users and mentors.

The new theme is "DITA from A to B," from Authoring to Building. There are now just two steps:

A) Author your own DITA content online.
Use the browser-based DITA Storm editor to author structured content in your workspace on this website. You don't have to install anything or know XML to begin writing topic-based content today.  A modest investment will help you develop skills you can transfer to the top XML Editors and XML Content Management Systems.

B) Build and publish to multiple formats.
You can have multiple projects in your personal workspace. Each project includes source files, build files, and output files. Process your files to HTML, PDF, Help, and other standards with the DITA Open Toolkit running on our server. Develop your DITA skills and download the results, or publish links to your work on our server.

Bob described three types of users the website is designed for:

Bob emphasized the A to B, and said the goal  of the members organization is to get them ready to use the DITA from A to Z tools, from DITA XML Editors to XML CMS, all of which are listed on the website (http://www.ditausers.org/tools/).

Bob showed major sections of the website including many extensive resources:

DITA News. About 30 places to go for news about DITA.

DITA Websites. 20 of the important websites covering DITA today.

DITA Mailing Lists. 6 mailing lists with frequent mentions of DITA.

DITA Publications. 37 publications and a link to a few dozen great presentations on DITA at ditamap.com.

DITA Communities. 11 communities, mostly in North America so far.

DITA Glossary. A glossary of about 50 DITA-related terms, which can be syndicated to serve on your website.

DITA Elements. A table of links into the DITA Language Specification (including version 1.1).

DITA Specifications. A table of links into the DITA Architectural Specification (including version 1.1).

DITA Open Toolkit User Guide and Reference. Links to the parts of the Open Toolkit User Guide and Reference.

The 50-term glossary may be syndicated to other websites.

Bob then showed the Comstar User Guide docset example. He encouraged everyone to get a copy of Introduction to DITA from Comtech Services and then do the exercises online.

He showed the Free Online Demo DITA Manager that anyone can use as a sandbox to explore the tools, and then went into his own DITA Manager and workspace folder to edit the Comstar User Guide source file to say "DITA Users Guide."

He then pressed the Build link and about 90 seconds later, there was a successful build of the DITA files to a new set of xhtml output files.  Attendees applauded.

Everyone then moved to the 12 workstations set up by our IMI hosts to browse the DITA Users site. Most attendees had already registered, but 6 new members were helped to register by David Pearson.

All were encouraged to try their hand at editing the source files and generating new builds. As the website is still in beta, David, Derek, and Bob went around the room collecting several bugs (most all fixed as of these notes).  The website includes the  develpment Road Map and a Blog documenting milestones progress at http://www.ditausers.org/about_us/blog/.

In conclusion, Bob described the DITA Mentor program (http://www.ditausers.org/membership/mentors/). Although the website is designed for beginners, he hopes that experienced DITA consultants will use the hosted tools to offer online seminars and workshops for DITA Users. They will do the workshop exercises in their own DITA Manager and workspace folder. He said that the training schedules would be published on the DITA Users site and the workshop screen sharing (all attendees would see the Mentor's screen) would be managed by the organization staff. The bulk of the fees would go directly to the DITA Mentors.