What does DITA have to do with wiki?

We tackled this question and then some at the January Central Texas DITA User Group meeting. I’m a little tardy in writing up my notes and thoughts about the presentation but it went really well and I appreciate all the attendee’s participation as well. We had a high school teacher in the audience and I applaud him for wanting to learn more about DITA to pass that knowledge on to high school students.

I brought along my XO laptop since I was talking about my work with wiki.laptop.org and Floss Manuals and found some more Austin-based XO fans, so that was a great side benefit to me as well.

One of Ben’s answers to the question “What does DITA have to do with wiki?” is “Maybe nothing.” Love it!

Ben introduced another the triangle of choices - you have likely heard of “cheap/good/fast, pick two.” How about “knowledge/reuse/structure, pick one.”

I have to do some thinking about that one and his perception of the limitations and tradeoffs offered by those choices or priorities. Reuse and structure are particularly difficult to pair but also give you the most payoff. Structure and knowledge are another likely pair, but it could be difficult to find subject matter experts who are also able to organize their writing in a very structured manner, and finding writers who know DITA really well and also have specific content knowledge may also be difficult to obtain. His workaround for the difficulty you’d face while trying to come up with a structured wiki is a sluice box - where raw, unstructured data is the top input, some sort of raw wiki is the next filter, and the final tightest filter of all is a topic-oriented wiki.

Original photo of a sluice box by t-dawg.

My take on the question is that there are three potential hybrid DITA wiki combinations, and Chris Almond at this presentation introduced the fourth that I have seen, using DITA as an intermediate storage device, interestingly.

The three DITA-wiki combination concepts I’ve seen are:

• Wikislices - using a DITA map to keep up with wiki “topic” (article) changes. Michael Priestly is working on this for the One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC.)
• DITA Storm – web-enabled DITA editor, but not very wiki-like. However, with just the addition of a History/Revision and Discussion tab, and an RSS feed, you could get some nice wiki features going with that product. Don Day had an interesting observation that sometimes when you add in too many wiki features on a web page you can hardly tell what’s content and where to edit it. I’d agree with that assessment.
• DITA to wikitext XSLT transform- but no round trip, have writers determine what content goes back to DITA source. Lisa Dyer will describe this content flow in the February session.

The slides are available on slideshare.net. Here are the slides that Ben Allums, Ragan Haggard, and I used.
[slideshare id=239223&doc=what-does-dita-have-to-do-with-wiki-1201150920945468-2&w=425]

Here are Chris Almond’s slides and his blog entry about the presentation. I described Chris’s project to Stewart Mader of wikipatterns.com and he blogged about our presentation as well at his blog ikiw.org.

[slideshare id=246329&doc=redbooks-wiki-central-texas-dita-ug-presentation-1201665419585231-4&w=425]

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Community support - don’t think of yourself as a customer but as a member of a movement

I’ve signed up for the Give 1 Get 1 program for One Laptop Per Child, and just received the email today, November 12, 2007, with the link to the site, www.laptopgiving.org.

I read the terms and conditions with interest because I am seriously considering purchasing a laptop either for my son, who is four, or for his classroom of four-year-olds. Plus, I’ve been volunteering to help with their end-user documentation.

I’d love to buy one for every classroom at my son’s preschool but that’ll take some fundraising. I’ll boldly propose here that you can contact me if you’re interested in buying enough for a small preschool in Austin, Texas in addition to kids in least developed countries around the world.

I absolutely LOVE the spirit of the support statement. It reads as follows:

Neither OLPC Foundation nor One Laptop per Child, Inc. has service facilities, a help desk or maintenance personnel in the United States or Canada. Although we believe you will love your XO laptop, you should understand that it is not a commercially available product and, if you want help using it, you will have to seek it from friends, family, and bloggers. One goal of the G1G1 initiative is to create an informal network of XO laptop users in the developed world, who will provide feedback about the utility of the XO laptop as an educational tool for children, participate in the worldwide effort to create open-source educational applications for the XO laptop, and serve as a resource for those in the developing world who seek to optimize the value of the XO laptop as an educational tool. A fee based tech support service will be available to all who desire it. We urge participants in the G1G1 initiative to think of themselves as members of an international educational movement rather than as “customers.”

I’ve been working on documentation for the XO laptop in the wiki at wiki.laptop.org/go/Simplified_user_guide and then taking the wiki content over to an Author-it instance. I’ll write more later about a wiki-based workflow, especially with translation in mind, and we are putting a process in place. Please, feel free to edit that page or contact me if you are interested in contributing.

Personally, the most difficult part so far has been my limited ability with design and layout. I have grand visions but feel my layout skills are inadequate for a kid- and parent-friendly look within Word. Nonetheless, it is an exciting time to be a small part of such an influential project.

I’m one of the friends, family, and bloggers who is willing to help with the XO laptop. So I urge you to go to www.laptopgiving.org and put your U$399 to good use.

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Audience considerations - writing technical doc for kids, parents, and teachers for One Laptop Per Child

I’ve recently (read:last week) learned that there is active recruiting going on for end-user documentation for One Laptop Per Child. The OLPC project, as it is also known as, is Nicholas Negroponte’s education project that hoped to build a US$100 laptop and take it to developing countries. It turns out, the product they plan to ship this fall with the Give 1 Get 1 program at xogiving.org is closer to US$188. For $400 you get to give one laptop and get another laptop. Wow, what a neat project and what an amazing difference it could make in the life of a child.

So far I am reading like crazy to try to understand the project and its audience, especially to understand the language and translation ramifications. So I have plenty to offer in background reading, such as these items:

The OLPC Wiki - OLPCWiki - wiki.laptop.org/
Laptop: A learning tool created … - www.laptop.org/laptop/
Vision: Children in the … - www.laptop.org/vision/index.shtml
Children: Children actively … - www.laptop.org/children/

FAQ for OLPC - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_FAQ

Especially good to read are the core principles: (1) child ownership; (2) low ages; (3) saturation; (4) connection; and (5) free and open source.

Last night I was even able to emulate the Sugar operating system using a great how-to emulate Sugar and the XO article on IBM’s developerworks site.

Unfortunately, after I created my user name, clicked Next, and then clicked the colors to make my “person” blue with a yellow outline, the emulator went into some reboot loop from which I could not escape. Every subsequent attempt to start up the emulator met with an X in the middle of the emulated screen.

To the OLPC Wiki I went, searched for “emulate” and found “Using QEMU on Windows XP,” and “Emulating the XO/Help and Tips” trying to troubleshoot my problem and see if anyone else had a similar situation. Interestingly, I found the “GUI won’t start” problem in the Sugar instructions wiki page. So I am deleting the original disk image I downloaded and trying to unzip it again.

And… that was it! I’m probably going to move that bit of troubleshooting information over to that Help and Tips page. Here’s the screenshot with proof that I can emulate the Sugar environment on my Dell laptop:

I’m very excited to be a part of this effort. If you’re interested in helping out, and don’t mind a chaotic process with references to wiki information that’s not necessarily the final answer to your questions, and want to translate things like “The units will ship with some kind of human-powered charger that plugs into the DC socket.” into child-friendly minimal task-oriented documentation, please email me using the Contact page.

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