Title: Message
Hi everyone,
I am still not clear on what the goals are either for this survey, or of the repackaging effort in general. Do we have a clear statement of what problem(s) we are trying to solve via repackaging?
If the problem is that the readers in the intended audience often can't find the information that they are looking for, repackaging may or may not be part of the solution. We should be looking at issues such as whether headings use the terms that readers are looking for, whether the organization of the document is meaningful, whether the index uses terms readers are looking for, and whether more powerful search capabilities would help.
If the problem is that the readers in the intended audience often can't find the information that they are looking for, surveys are of limited use in providing the kind of data we would need in order to solve the problem. We'd need to do something more along the lines of card sorting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_sorting).
I'll state a few assumptions about audiences just to make sure we're all working from the same set of assumptions: If I recall correctly, we decided some time ago that the intended audience of the DITA specification is developers of DITA tools, not end-users or managers. I think we should have a goal of having the spec, or at least the language reference portion of the spec, be understandable to information architects who have a good grasp of XML.
We don't want the spec to be unnecessarily abstruse, but I think we also recognize that no matter how much we improve the writing and organization of the DITA spec, it won't be understandable to non-technical end-users, translators, or managers. People who don't have a pretty deep grasp of what XML is just aren't going to get it. So let's make sure that when we're asking people if they understand the spec, we're only asking the type of people who are technical enough to understand this type of spec. Otherwise the results won't be meaningful.
Cheers,
Su-Laine
Su-Laine Yeo
Solutions Consultant
JustSystems Canada, Inc.
Office: 1 (778) 327-6356
XMetaL Community Forums: http://forums.xmetal.com
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-----Original Message-----
From: Joann Hackos [mailto:]
Sent: Tuesday, December 14, 2010 10:04 AM
To: DITA TC
Subject: [dita] FW: Feedback for Survey
------ Forwarded Message
From: Lovonya Thomas <>
Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2010 09:37:57 -0700
To: <>
Cc: JoAnn Hackos <>
Subject: RE: Feedback for Survey
Hello Thilo,
JoAnn Hackos asked me to send you a draft of the survey with the updates. Below is a link to the preview page of the survey.
http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22BFUN323SP/Preview
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Best wishes,
Lovonya
Lovonya Thomas
Events Coordinator
Comtech Services
1-303-232-7586
<mailto:>
www.comtech-serv.com <http://www.comtech-serv.com/>
www.infomanagementcenter.com <http://www.infomanagementcenter.com/>
------ Forwarded Message
From: "Buchholz, Thilo" <>
Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2010 16:46:46 +0100
To: JoAnn Hackos <>
Subject: Feedback for Survey
Hello JoAnn,
Here is the collected feedback I remember:
Please remove demographic questions and replace with an optional field to insert the eMail in case the person answering the survey wants to be contacted
Please add additional Industries, on the word we had, you can add additional industries:
pharmaceutical
semiconductor
public services
software
manufacture
banking
computer hardware
military
medical equipment
health care
I think there was also a proposal to have a matrix type question that allows to specify the use case per DITA 1.2 chapter.
That is all I have noted.
BR Thilo
Dr. Thilo Buchholz
Head of Production Platform Management & Operations
Knowledge Productization Services
SAP AG
T +49/62 27/76 13 31
M +49/170/2 20 01 17
