Folks, As with the DocBook SubCommittee for Publishers, the OASIS DocBook Technical Committee has authorized the formation of subcommittees for the purpose of creating official customization layers to support the needs of various domains. These customizations are officially "DocBook variants", but also drive requirements back to core DocBook.
We have a tremendous opportunity to support the future of education with the formation of a DocBook SubCommittee for eLearning. The charter for this SC may include support for: - Enabling creation of Online Learning and Technical Training - SCORM-compliant output - Other forms of educational publications (such as textbooks) The charter will NOT include support for: - layout-intensive publishing The first step is to gather interested parties via the docbook-a...@lists.oasis-open.org<mailto:docbook-a...@lists.oasis-open.org> <mailto:docbook-a...@lists.oasis-open.org> list and from industry contacts. With three or more interested parties, the following guideline has been established at OASIS: "If you're planning on starting up a subcommittee, there's no need to create a discussion list -- typically that's done to tighten up scope, etc. before submitting a charter for a new Technical Committee. All that's necessary to get started is to organize the respective interested parties, put together a statement of work, and submit it to the TC for approval. And someone needs to volunteer to take on the role of chair. Of course all participants need to be OASIS members." I see this as a tremendous opportunity for those in the DocBook community who are interested in producing eLearning content and for those already using DocBook for technical publications, but some other solution for education content. Adopters will also be able to take advantage of the robust tool and community support that DocBook already enjoys. It's also a tremendous opportunity for DocBook to garner additional industry adoption. In fact, an enterprising DocBook user has already donated a DocBook to SCORM open source project (docbook2scorm) on Google Code, which has had 730 downloads to date. This demonstrates a strong interest in using DocBook for eLearning, even though DocBook currently does not provide explicit support for it! The subcommittee effort would provide additional content models as part of the official DocBook variant to provide a much more rich eLearning experience. Please let me know if you are interested in participating in this effort. Thanks and best regards, --Scott [cid:image001.gif@01CA3C31.47ECDD50] Scott Hudson Senior XML Architect +1 (303) 542-2146 | Office +1 (720) 663-SCOT [7268] | Gvoice scott.hud...@flatironssolutions.com http://www.flatironssolutions.com
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