My regrets, I thought I'd posted these a while ago.
ActionItems:
- Zoe will look at building some kind of CN output during Xmas break.
- Stan will follow up on CN work
- Stan will post about Boston DUG meeting.
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Minutes of the OASIS DITA TC
Tuesday, 9 December 2025
Recorded by Nancy Harrison
link to agenda for this meeting:
https://github.com/oasis-tcs/dita/wiki/Previous-agendas
Attendance:
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Robert Anderson, Stan Doherty, Kristen Eberlein, Nancy Harrison, Scott Hudson, Zoe Lawson, Christina Rothwell, Eric Sirois, Leroy Steinbacher, Dawn Stevens
Business
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Regrets: Eric Sirois, Eliot Kimber
1. Approve minutes from previous business meetings
26 August 2025 Taken by Nancy Harrison https://groups.oasis-open.org/higherlogic/ws/groups/c2c11e3a-c9cd-43d9-840b-018dc7cd5db9/documents/meetings/document?document_id=72975
Kristen moved, 2nd Scott?, approved by TC
2. Announcements
Mike McGinniss (Tritium) at upcoming Boston DUGmeeting; Stan will send out info.
Zoe; now officially not at Synopsis, now Keysite - Synopsis merged/purchased Ansys, her group was sold off to Keysite.
3. Proposal for TC Discussion - DITA 2.0 User Guide
Stan Doherty
Stan; 3 parts to proposal
1. Do we have enough bandwidth to do something in addition to spec, not instead? If yes, what might that be? a user guide would be useful for the industry.
2. Is a user guide appropriate, or something else?
3. If yes, what kind, what audience? If a user guide, what would it look like?
Kris; we've talked about post-2.0 focusing more on CNs, which is what OASIS has for non-spec content.
Stan; we do want OASIS's blessing.
Robert; if we do have CNs about various features, OASIS would be happy.
Scott; and there would be less liability issues.
Kris; OASIS puts much less regs around CNs, much more lightweight approval process, optional public review; we could use a CN to publish whatever we want.
Robert; there are all kinds of rules for a spec, CN has very little of that.
Leroy; think it's a great idea; all in favor and happy to help.
Zoe; I think we definitely need it; getting a brief description of why DITA exists and why its good is hard, not one online.
Dawn; think it's a great idea; can't work on it because it would be a conflict, currently writing my own book.
Kris; can you tell us about your book?
Dawn; we put out one at 1.3, just updating it; more a tutorial style, now overhauling it to be more up-to-date.
Nancy; for writers or for implementors of DITA?
Dawn; for writers, definitely.
Scott; Eliot is working on a new version of his book as well.
Kris; I have a contract for a book on specializations, so books for writers, info arch's for designing a strategy for metadata and reuse, for content engineers who do specialization, and DITA practicioners who do plugins, and implementors who are integrating a large app like DITA-OT, so there'll be a large nuber of different audiences. We have a number of CNs that we agreed as TC to work on, have been sitting in a queue; one was a troubleshooting, one for migrating to 2.0, maybe other?
Stan; maybe start with an inventory of what you're talking about, get a list, also get feedback from field about what they want.
Zoe; I've been lagging on migration guide, life happened.
Kris; one thing is that I no longer have bandwidth, now that i'm at Mayo, to do a bunch of the stuff I used to do, and we really need to deal with our own processes for publishing.
Zoe; this could be case studies of our own work. as we try to get 2.0 out.
Kris; if we're considering splitting our focus between spec and user guide/CN, Stan, are you willing to take primary role of coordinating CN content?
Stan; I'm not sure what leadership would be, but I'd be glad to help. Shall we invite other folks to join us in January to recruit for this?
Kris; has to be OASIS members
Robert; are they members of TC who don't show up?
Stan; certainly double digits; I went thru the list to find possibilities, and if they came might also increase out spec bandwidth.
Kris; 2 things; we'd be doing the world a service, and process of doing it might give us more TC members and help us get 2.0 out the door.
Stan; that would be great.
Zoe; I'm not entirely sure what needs to happen next. I'm not sure where I can step in to assist; maybe in January we can get a real handle on how we can pick up slack from Kris.
Christine; same here; I want to help, but I need direction; it was good when we had assignments. like the idea fo having a list of things to get done.
Kris; Stan, my point of asking about leadership, if we're adding work to our plate, I don't want to be responsible.
Stan; adding things to your plate is not OK, I'm willing to get things rolling, but there's plenty of room for other leadership.
Nancy what next?
Stan; I can take what we've talked about here, make list of action items and tasks, bring that list / framework to our meeting in January.
Kris; would it make sense to do some brainstorming what topics come to mind forsuch a user guide? or do folks need to think about it?
Christine; I've heard back from users about what aspects of spec have caused confusion in the past; that would be helpful do we want to talk about benefits of DITA in this guide? what is scope? why would you want to go to 2.0? AI and all that fun stuff. We might have all different idea of what we might want to provide.
Nancy; for most writers, they didn't make the decision to go to DITA; it gets made by mgmt.
Christine; having info about why DITA is helpful helps teams.
Stan; in working with academia, their most common request is a 10-page intro to DITA, both in user group and academic settings, a request for an overview; that's what I hear most frequently.
Kris; so, a Part 0 of the spec; a conceptual grounding and basics; we never picked it up because we knew we could never do it in spec format. and while we talk about this kind of content; this is like the DITA Adoption TC.
[adoption TC discussion]
Kris; one potential ActionItem for next meeting; we need someone to do research to figure out where we are with the various diff CNs, we need to build at least one output for each of the various CNs now in progress.
Zoe; I could poke thru things during xmas
Kris; put that on an AI
***ActionItem: Zoe will look at building some kind of CN output during Xmas break.
Stan; is there conditional tagging in our current spec that takes out comments.
Robert; no it's been taken out.
Kris; but I made an effort to archive stuff in our repo of stuff that might be CN material.
Zoe; also, we've been putting draft-comments, so I could search for those?
Kris; draft comments that were really review-based, those wouldn't help so much, those stay as part of content fusion review; they don't go into the spec repo.
11:59am ET close
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Nancy Harrison
Principal, Infobridge Solutions
Nancy Harrison (Personal)
978-505-9189
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