DITA for Crowds—How to Collect and Assemble Content From Multiple Experts

Collecting and assembling contributions from multiple authors into a single body of content poses unique challenges. Those problems multiply when your objective is to use multi-channel publishing. This is exactly what XML Press needed to do when it teamed with The Content Wrangler to create a content strategy book series. The series includes several books that collect term definitions from multiple contributors. To efficiently produce those books, we needed both a methodology and supporting technology that would allow a facilitator/editor to manage 52 contributors for each book. Also, XML Press and The Content Wrangler wanted to use this series as a showcase for different methods of managing multi-channel publishing. Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler for this free one-hour webinar with his special guests Richard Hamilton, Publisher at XML Press, and Don Day. Together they will show how XML Press developed "The Language of Technical Communication" using expeDITA, a DITA-based wiki developed by Don. The expeDITA framework uses DITA as its native format but offers authors a forms-based interface that requires no knowledge of DITA. It provides the support needed to effectively manage contributions from many authors and ensure that those contributions can be used in multiple output channels. Attendees can expect to learn: • the challenges of providing a collaboration environment for multi-author works • the risks and rewards of using structured content in a collaboration environment • how we selected and adapted the expeDITA platform for this project • how we applied the facilitator/contributor model on a per-project basis • the lifecycle of a typical project, from proposal to marketing campaigns