solutions content

[Bruce Esrig <esrig-ia@esrig.com>]

I delayed putting up advice about how to contribute content, and Carol has 
been leading the charge ... on these fronts:

  - Update DITA Knowledgebase home page with relevant topics and links to 
new content
  - Mine yahoo dita-users group for content
  - Jump-start user groups by posting a how-to-host message

The effectiveness of these efforts makes me think that we should indeed 
actively recruit on the yahoo dita-users group for a few new members of the 
editorial board, to actively write solution-oriented content.

I was tempted to create a section on the DITA Knowledgebase page for 
contributed solutions, but I'm torn. Carol has been integrating what she 
finds into the existing lists.

The key problem with the existing content is that it traces a success path, 
but doesn't say how to help with the struggles along the way. That's what 
the idea of the solutions area would be. Mostly a supplement to the main 
path. Perhaps a better name for it would be a troubleshooting area. What 
problem are you having, and what alternatives are there for solving it?

For example, we had someone trying to figure out what publishing pipeline 
to adopt. They posted an article in French saying that Framemaker worked 
for them out of the box. At around the same time, someone posted an article 
saying that they had put together a downloadable extension to the DITA open 
toolkit that offers a GUI interface for it. It would be great to have a 
questions/solutions/troubleshooting area where someone could write up pros 
and cons to each approach.

The reason we didn't have that before is that we were doing our best to 
stay out of the way of the solutions consultants. But the truth is that 
there is plenty of solutions consulting left to be done even if we 
cultivate content for the do-it-yourselfers.

Your thoughts?

Bruce