Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

First Day of the CMS Conference
Returned to the Loews Hotel in the morning and had breakfast in the convention hall. At 8:30 everyone filed into the large reception room, where JoAnn Hackos gave the introductory speech. It was clear from the size of the audience that the conference could already be considered a success for the organizers. Hackos mentioned that there were over 200 participants from a dozen countries here to see 46 speakers present. Her talk was interesting, focusing on the idea that information design and delivery has reached a tipping point with the advent and seemingly rapid and wide-scale industry adoption of DITA and supporting technologies. She hit upon what I think were the fairly obvious points of this line of thinking, driving home how DITA can ultimately benefit customers and users, how companies can more easily work with one another when they can interchange data using DITA, and how it provides added value for partners. All of this was appropriate given that there was an entire stream of talks focusing on DITA, and clearly it was a topic that many people in the room were interested in learning more about – including us. The opening talk was unfortunately hampered by some AV problems -- first some screaming feedback that lasted way too long (where was the AV guy?) and which left my ears ringing for the rest of the morning, and then a couple of videos driven off of the a laptop, first without sound, then without an obvious way to start things off. Made a mental note to check out the AV connections and understand how the video program whenever I next have need of them at one of my own presentations. At the end of her talk we all left and had a short break while they subdivided the large conference hall into three sections, one each for the Management, DITA and Technical Track presentations to follow over the next two and a half days.

Checked emails on my Blackberry during the break and was pleased to find out that the impending TTC strike back home had been averted. Was glad, if only because it would make things easier for the nanny looking after our girls during the day, and that work would not be disrupted as I had expected had the strike gone through.

The first presentation I went to was Michael Priestley's who is a recognized "DITA guru", who happens to hail from IBM Canada. He gave a very good presentation called "Scenario-Based Information Development with DITA". What I found most interesting of that presentation was the extent to which they identify users and goals, using Personas -- something I am very familiar with in the Web development world, but had not thought of applying fully to the realm of documentation. Also presented some very good ideas I can use on defining task flows, and I will have to look into UEUML (User Experience Unified Modeling Language) which was new to me. I had certainly heard and used UML before, but the User Experience variety seems more directed towards my needs.

Next presentation was by a couple of representatives from Avaya gave a talk called "Climbing Mt. Everest in Beach Sandals", which talked about how they moved towards a single-sourced solution and how they implemented a CMS (Contex from LiveLinx). Unfortunately the talk was really more like how they reached a base camp on Everest, since they have yet to go the whole route and implement a fully XML-based solution -- they are on their way there, but things are still very much a work in progress. It was at about this point that I realized that the sessions at an hour long were on the short side -- by the end of the talk people were only just beginning to get into the real nitty-gritty stuff, and then it was time to wrap things up. This trend would continue with other speakers, and as a whole made for unsatisfying presentations.

At lunchtime we had a lengthy break, so I headed down to Annapolis proper, going down of the main streets and seeing what their was to be seen. Headed down West Street and then made the trip back up to the impressive-looking state capitol building. The city was founded back in the mid 17th-century and unlike many other North American cities that I am familiar with, was based on a spoke arrangement, with often narrow streets radiating out from the important loci of the city, which in this case are the local church and the capitol building. Only had just over an hour to look around and take some pictures, but did the best I could, as you can see:

Typical Narrow Street in Annapolis	State House, Annapolis
Taney Statue, Video Surveillance Camera and State House	De Kalb Statue and State House
Panoramic Image of the Maryland State House

After the short walk around town, went back and saw a few more presentations, including "Authoring Topic-Based Content in DITA" by two other people from IBM (too much background info on their own project, and then not a lot of "meat" when they finally got to the code), and then the "Overview of DITA Elements and Attributes", (considerably better, as it became something of a DITA free-for-all with several IBM presenters chipping in with something to say at one point or another).

At the end of the day went out with a vendor who had invited us out for dinner. Decided to have crab cakes since I was in the right area for them, and they were easily the best I had ever had. A memorable dinner, though I roundly had my ear talked off by a salesman -- well worth it though, and he and his associate were both interesting dinner guests.

It was another "French meal" though, and the cold that I had picked up from Annie was beginning to make itself felt. Could smell the sea air as we left the place, and a bright, steady light of Jupiter hung low over the southern sky.

Arrived back at the hotel shortly afterwards and again crashed out.