Drupaldevdays session: Documenting (in) Drupal, the next generation - leveraging DITA, RDFa, fingerprints and mindmaps

This is a presentation that I gave at the Drupal Developer Days, on 6 February 2011. It's meant as an introduction to single sourcing. It contains the results of the documentation questionnaire we ran. What would the ideal documentation system for a community driven project like Drupal look like? From the outside Drupal is perceived as a well documented project, and several people choose to work with Drupal because of this. On the inside however, a lot of people complain about the documentation. What's the reason and the meaning of these differences in perception? In this session I want to present the results of a survey that I'll do in preparation for Drupal Dev Days to investigate the general level of satisfaction with the Drupal documentation system and the main areas where people think our infrastructure should or could be improved. I'll explore how we could leverage technologies like DITA (Darwin Information Type Architecture), RDF, RDFa, fingerprint and mindmaps to build a documentation infrastructure that provides solutions for these pain points. I'll also give a short introduction to the work we've been doing to implement some of these technologies in Drupal and how you could put it all together. Intended audience: (Drupal) documentation enthusiasts, technical writers Questions answered by this session Question 1: What would the ideal documentation system for Drupal look like? Question 2: What could we improve in the Drupal documentation infrastructure and how hard would it be to implement those improvements? Question 3: How can we make it easier to write documentations for distributions, single deployment projects and anything between those 2? Question 4: What is single sourced documentation? Question 5: How can you make a DITA based documentation system in Drupal? The Video for this session is up on the internet Archive