DITA: Opportunities To Help Shape The Standard, Promote DITA Adoption, Develop Real-World Solutions

Want to get involved in the formation of one of the most important XML standards impacting content professionals? You can. And, you should. The folks at OASIS—the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards—have made it easy for just about anyone to participate.

• Opportunity 1 – The DITA Maturity Model Community and Wiki—Share constructive criticism, make suggestions for improvement, and provide use case scenarios that can help enhance the model. Post comments between 1 June – 31 August 2008 to be automatically entered to win an 8GB Apple iPod Touch and two tickets to DocTrain East.
• Opportunity 2 – Join The DITA Adoption Technical Committee—Yes, it’s confusing—and the name is kinda stupid—but the DITA Adoption Technical Committee has nothing to do with the technicalities of DITA. It has everything to do with moving the standard into the mainstream, where widespread adoption can have maximum impact. Smart marketing folks and new media mavens are definitely needed, as well as sponsors to provide financial support for these efforts.
• Opportunity 3 – One Laptop Per Child, DITA, Wikipedia, Wiki Slice Project—The mission of this project is to deliver a proof of concept that demonstrates how to create custom curriculum materials from Wikipedia for the One Laptop Per Child program. Objectives include pulling content from Wikipedia into the DITA format, delivering Wikipedia resources in an interchange-friendly and semantically-rich set of DITA-specialized topics that can be used as classroom materials, integrating DITA topics using a DITA map derived from a wiki slice. Get involved. Add your name to the team roster.

So, what are you waiting for? Get involved today!