New DITA Focus Area Editorial Board member...

[Scott Prentice <sp@leximation.com>]

Greetings!

My name is Scott Prentice. After starting development of a website, 
www.ditamap.com, which was to be a gathering point for dita users and 
related information, I learned of your efforts to do the same thing at 
xml.org. Rather than forging ahead on my own, I was encouraged to join 
forces with your group (which made good sense to me). Feel free to visit 
www.ditamap.com to see what type of content and functionality that I was 
envisioning (probably much of the same thing that you're already working 
on). I think that having one central website where people can come to 
learn about and make effective use of dita will help to increase the 
adoption rate and understanding.

I'm hoping to help out where I can with this project. Other than the 
overall goal of making it easier for people to learn about dita, I don't 
have any particular areas that I want to focus on. I have experience 
with web development (Perl, PHP, MySQL in particular), and was a tech 
writer in a previous life. My dita experience started a few years ago 
when I worked at Autodesk and was involved in their move to structured 
authoring (they ended up with a very loosely dita-based data model). I 
now have my own consulting company, Leximation, and am working with 
Adobe on their dita-based CMS (mostly developing FrameMaker plugins to 
make it easier for authors to work with structured files). If you are so 
inclined, you can read more about my background on the About page at 
www.leximation.com.

I look forward to working with you all, and look forward to getting 
dita.xml.org up and running!

Regards,

Scott

Scott Prentice
Leximation, Inc.
www.leximation.com
+1.415.485.1892