I'm finally back in Austin. The Delta flight this morning from Cincinnati was eventless.
Upcoming Interlude
Oddly enough, I'm now at a conference at the airport Hilton. That makes 3 Hiltons in 3 days for me. I found this conference thanks to an entry in one of my now favorite tools, upcoming.org. It's delightful to browse around for events in the Austin area and actually find things. Unlike most sites that are user content driven, upcoming.org has managed to get a lot of information about Austin in it. Usually, when it comes to geo-location or event info, if you're not on one of the coasts, you get crap content in "local" sites. And, the upcoming.org interface is nice.
As I've said before, if you're doing events, esp. tech events, you should start adding them to upcoming.org. It's good stuff.
Chautauqua
So, why would I be at a FrameMaker conference? Looking over the sessions, it turns out this isn't a purely FrameMaker conference. It actually seems like a conference about "tech pubs" (as we called it at BMC) focused on the tools and technologies that help produce it.
As you might be able to reverse engineer from my developer background and my predilection to write/blog, I actually like documentation. I've spent a lot of time either discussing or trying to move the technological bar for tech documentation up, esp. when I was at BMC. As you can imagine, in the process of becoming Agile, tech pubs was one of the thornier areas: the way the code worked could change or be added to every 2 weeks and keeping up with those changes in the manuals was a loosing battle.
I always looked towards wikis for a sort of community-driven, multi-author, "living" manual. Of course, the tech pubs people I talked to brought me down a notch from the utopic-ceiling I was skating around, e.g., for things like systems management you can't just throw up a wiki, garden it some, and let it take care of itself. Well...you can't at the moment at least ;>
Anyhow, getting further down from the ceiling the three things I'm interested in are:
FrameMaker - hey, why not? Also, it'd be nice to pick up on other tools.
DITA and other XML-based ways of documenting. More important than just putting docs in those formats, I'm interested in finding out the new, hopefully innovative ways documentation can be used and authored once you DITA/XML it.
The general state and feel for the tech pubs community at the moment.
What the tech pubs community thinks of and does with "open source documentation" in this user-generated content era.
Anne tells me these conference have a good reputation, so I'm looking forward on that endorsement paying off.
Disclaimer: Adobe is a client, as is BMC, where Ann works is a client. Also, the Chautauqua folks were kind enough to comp. me a press/analyst pass.
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