Our DITA Conference agenda is just about complete.  Despite the tight economy, speakers have been great about offering their expertise, and their companies have agreed to cover their travel.  These generous folks include Kent Taylor, Mahesh Kumar Gupta, Leigh White, Mollye Barrett, Don Bridges, Betty Harvey, Kristen J. Eberlein, Mariana Alupului, Jeff Jagoda, Michael Beaver, Tricia York Garrett, Susan Carpenter, Brandy Byrd Gantt, Andy Lewis, Larry Kunz, Pam Noreault, Julio J. Vazquez, Karen Deen, Frances Overby, Jon Parsons, and Dorothy Hoskins.

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There has been some renewed discussion within the DITA Technical Committee on what it means to be "DITA conformant". It is timely that this topic has been resurrected, because many Help Authoring Tools are now claiming DITA support of some sort or another. A draft clause in the DITA 1.2 specification proposes that tools claiming DITA support must provide a conformance statement listing what DITA features they actually implement.

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The Summer XML Conference presentations were carefully selected to be highly technical, marketing fluff free, and presented by real users and technology experts.  Presentations are set up in 3 tracks, with keynotes each day.  Here is what you can expect. 

• Keynote: Survivor: XML (Leigh W. White, Allscripts)
• Introduction to XSLT Concepts (Debbie Lapeyre, Mulberry Technologies)
• Introduction to DITA (Kristen James Eberlein, IBM)
• Ex-XHTML HTML (Doug Schepers, W3C)

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I produced the first fully DITA conference in the US a few years back. Each year since then, I've had the pleasure to work on one or two DITA conferences per year.  For each, I pushed to ensure the conference provide a well-rounded user education experience.

So, one of my main tasks over the next week or so is to locate a speaker for a conference presentation on DITA maps.  A low-to-high technical presentation, maybe with a corny title -- cartography or navigation or something in the title. :-) 

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The XML conference I'm producing covers many aspects of XML.  The audience is always varied, with engineers, gurus, newbies, managers, tech comm folks, IT folks, and others coming to learn and network.

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