The August 11, 2010 Chapter Meeting
In the Trenches with DITA
We hear a lot about structured authoring and DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) these days, and there are plenty of webinars and conference presentations that talk about the benefits that can come from shifting content into DITA--opportunities for content reuse, lower costs for translation, conditional processing, automatic linking, improved consistency and usability, and more. But what's it like for writers who actually works with DITA on a day-to-day basis? Is it much different from the way they worked before? Is it hard to make the shift? Are they glad they did? Have their jobs changed? This month at Berkeley STC we will hear from a panel of writers who work with DITA on a regular basis to author documentation and training content. They will tell us what that's like from the writer's perspective, when DITA is fully integrated into the workflow. Bring your questions and join us for this insider look at DITA.
Speakers:
Mysti Berry, Ben Colborn, and Tom Idleman
Mysti Berry has been a technical writer for 20 years and is presently a Lead Technical Writer at Salesforce.com. She has been working with the DITA OpenToolkit for the last five years, including having survived a FrameMaker-to-DITA conversion, and the tardy adoption of a content/information model. Salesforce.com creates context-sensitive help, developer guides, implementation and tip guides, quick reference guides, and release notes using DITA. Their deliverable types include HTML, PDF, and eBooks. They also create videos, guided tours, and now comic books with non-DITA tools. Mysti has taught at UC Berkeley Extension, and holds a B.A. in Linguistics from UCSC and an MFA from University of San Francisco. She has won multiple awards for her technical writing and screenplay and fiction, and served as STC Touchstone judge. Ben Colborn is a Courseware Development Lead for Citrix Education. At Citrix, courseware developers use DITA to create instructor-led training (PDF and PPT) and eLearning (HTML and Flash interactions in SCORM). In addition to developing training material for Citrix virtualization technologies, Ben works to improve course quality and simplify internal development processes. Before joining Citrix Education, he taught academic and professional writing at the college level and worked as a Unix system administrator at Sun Microsystems. He holds a B.A. in English from the University of Idaho and an M.A. in TESOL from San José State University. Tom Idleman has been working with DITA for 7 years, both as a technical writer and a course developer. As a senior technical writer at IBM and FICO, he has written a wide range of documentation in DITA using mainly Epic Editor and XMetaL. As a course developer for Lasselle-Ramsay, he delivered a 4-hour training session on XMetaL and DITA at DocTrain East 2008, a full-day training session on XMetaL and DITA for Intel Corporation, and developed the XMART DITA CMS training program for Cisco Systems..
Date:
Times:
Location:
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
6:00 to 7:00 pm: Networking, conversation & dinner
7:00 to 7:15 pm: Announcements
7:15 to 8:30 pm: Presentation
8:30 to 9:00 pm: Conversation,
follow up on job announcements
9:00 to 9:15 pm: Clear the room; move conversations to the sidewalk
Highlands Country Club,110 Hiller Drive, Oakland, California