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Carol, a potentially poor situation is building up around the DITA FA's
forum and blog areas. Users have been using these tools to pose questions
that need answered by a variety of SMEs. My Toolkit developers do not have
time to browse these forums daily, which I suspect is true of other SMEs
too. My toolkit team relies on the "push" capability of the dita-users
forum to keep us abreast of issues needing our response. This site has
been very effective and responsive for support, especially urgent
queries--the kind most likely to fall between the cracks in a pull-based
environment such as the DITA FA.
If a user wants the most possible eyes on his or her question, there are
900+ subscribers on dita-users, many using the immediate email option to
keep track of support questions. I do not believe the current user stats
that I am seeing on the FA front page: "There are currently 0 users and
3384 guests online. " I suspect that the counter is accumulating over
time, and that the questions now appearing on the forum are getting very
little actual visibility.
I am especially concerned about users posing questions on the blogs. This
isn't what blogs are intended for, but users will grab at any writeable
space they can find if they are not clearly aware of other venues. Somehow
we need to promote the preferred behavior for blogs (messaging rather than
support).
We have the same issue for other tools that offer help facilities that
users discover, but which are less effective than dita-users. Sourceforge
provides a practically useless help mailing list, for example, which is
getting questions better answered on a broadly subscribed list. From
dita-users, we can triage the items easily and point them to the next best
resource if necessary such as the DITA FA. The triage center aspect of
dita-users is probably the key reason to keep that forum in our overall
support picture--to avoid swamping the doorways of the specialists who end
up referring patients to other hospitals rather than tending their own
urgent user issues.
I am inclined to respond to these out-of-place questions with boilerplate
like this that I had to use this morning for a support question posed to an
obscure OT support list. What do others suggest?
-------
Thank you for your inquiry. It is important to be connected with the user
community who have the experience to guide you in your questions. I suggest
these resources:
The Yahoo! dita-users forum http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dita-users (the
best place to post questions like these and get quick answers--over 900
people are on this list!)
The DITA Focus Area http://dita.xml.org (the "watering hole" where you can
get latest info on tools, background, techniques, educational materials,
etc.)
The DITA Coverpage bibliography site http://xml.coverpages.org/dita.html
(everything ever published about DITA is listed here, by category)
Because this [forum/blog/mailing list] is not often monitored, I encourage
you to bookmark the above sites and freely engage the users there, most of
whom have been through similar "getting started" scenarios that they would
be glad to recommend.
--
sig
Regards,
--
Don Day
Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
IBM Lead DITA Architect
Email: dond@us.ibm.com
11501 Burnet Rd. MS9033E015, Austin TX 78758
Phone: +1 512-838-8550
T/L: 678-8550
"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
--T.S. Eliot
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