Presentations and publications

Past presentations

Links may go out of date as conferences remove or archive their content. I try to keep links up to date, so please let me know if you tried one that no longer works.

April 9, 2025: Migrate to DITA? In This Day and Age? at ConVEX in San Jose, CA
February 17-18, 2025: Migrate to DITA? In This Day and Age? at DITA Europe in Copenhagen, Denmark.
February 16, 2025: DITA-OT Day in Copenhagen, Denmark. Sessions included:
- Welcome sessions
- DITA-OT and DITA 2.0: Who’s done what now?
- Closing sessions and Future Plans
February 12, 2024: DITA Europe 2024 in Helsinki, Finland. Presented "When do we get a new DITA?", about timelines for the upcoming DITA 2.0.
November 11, 2024: Presentations at DITA-OT Day 2024 in Helsinki, Finland, once again hosted by SyncroSoft. Recordings and slides at https://www.oxygenxml.com/events/2024/dita-ot_day.html. My sessions included:
- Welcome session
- Moving an HTML plugin to preprocess2: how scared should you be?
- "Shop talk" closing panel discussion
Incidentially, it was wonderful only having one session outside of the opening and closing sessions; it's great to see so many new faces showing up to present their own work with DITA-OT!
April 19, 2023: ConVEx North America in Baltimore, Maryland. Planned to present "Publishing in the Cloud"; came down with my first case of Covid the day before and couldn't make it out of my room the day of my session.
November 14, 2022: ConVEx Europe 2022 in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Presented "Publishing in the Cloud: Managing high-volume publishing for OCI Documentation".
November 13, 2022: Several presentations at DITA-OT Day 2022 in Rotterdam, Netherlands, once again hosted by SyncroSoft. Recordings and slides at https://www.oxygenxml.com/events/2022/dita-ot_day.html. My sessions included:
- Welcome session
- Making the migration leap: jumping across versions to the latest DITA-OT
- Scaling the DITA Open Toolkit for Enterprise Use
- "Shop talk" closing panel discussion
May 3, 2022: ConVEx in Tempe, AZ. Presented "DITA-OT: Time to Break Things Again" on upcoming changes (some backwards incompatible) in DITA-OT 4.0.
February 2022: DITA Festa by DITA Consortium Japan. Presented "DITA 2.0 Nearing the Finish" on DITA 2.0 -- upcoming changes and impacts to authors and tools.
December 2021: Boston DITA User's Group. Presented on changes coming with DITA 2.0.
September 21-23, 2020: ConVEx Virtual Experience. Presented "Do You Really Want To Make Me Cry? Advice to my former self", about lessons learned over many years of DITA-OT plugin development and maintenance. Also participated as a panelist for DITA 2.0 discussion with Kris Eberlein, Zoe Lawson, and Eliot Kimber.
November 9, 2019: DITA Open Toolkit Day in Brussels, Belgium. Hosted by SyncroSoft; sessions included:
- Welcome sessions
- Trim your toolkit with this one weird trick!
- DITA-OT Shop Talk: Panel discussion
November 7 and 8, 2019: DITA Europe in Brussels, Belgium. Presented "When Your Narrative Document Becomes Law", a case study of the DITA Specification and how to adapt to a changing content strategy; also participated in closing panel about the future of DITA.
October 11, 2019: Presented "The State and Future of DITA: News from the OASIS DITA Committee" at Adobe DITA World.
April 15-19, 2019: CMS / DITA North America in Durham, NC. Solo presentation on the new plugin registry for DITA Open Toolkit; second session with Rob Richter on how our small team in IBM supports authoring and publishing for 800+ writers across the corporation.
November 5 and 6, 2018: DITA Europe in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Presented "Ask Not What Your DITA-OT Can Do for You…", about who should contribute to DITA-OT and why; co-presented interactive closing panel on the future of DITA, together with Eliot Kimber.
November 4, 2018: DITA Open Toolkit Day in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Hosted by SyncroSoft; sessions included:
- Opening sessions
- Highlights in recent DITA-OT versions, with Jarno Elovirta
- Meta DITA samples: testing around the edge cases
- Who are you calling “stale”? Updates around DITA-OT issue tracking, with Roger Sheen and Jarno Elovirta
- What's next for DITA-OT? Panel discussion
October 12, 2018: Presented "DITA 2.0: Strategies for your Content’s Future" at Adobe DITA World.
April 25, 2018: CMS / DITA North America
- "The future of DITA: Looking ahead!"
- Invited penelist for 2.5 hour session that closed the conference, titled "The Trouble with DITA—Improving DITA Satisfaction Panel
October 29, 2017: Several presentations at DITA-OT Day 2017 in Berlin, Germany, once again hosted by SyncroSoft. Recordings and slides at http://www.oxygenxml.com/events/2017/dita-ot_day.html. My sessions included:
- Accessibility in DITA-OT
- Generating SVG syntax diagrams with plugins for all output formats
- Managing a large scale build environment with 50+ custom plugins
- Interactive discussion with Jarno Elovirta about what both developers and customers need from DITA-OT
- Closing panel discussion about the future of DITA-OT
October 24, 2017: State of the DITA Open Toolkit and Open Source Publishing with DITA, at tcworld 2017 in Stuttgart, Germany. Note: Unfortunately, I had to cancel my flight on the day I was scheduled to leave for Stuttgart. My presentation was delivered by my DITA-OT colleague Roger Sheen, who did an amazing job.
October 10, 2017: What Is DITA Open Toolkit, and What Should FrameMaker Authors Know About It?, at Adobe DITA World 2017 online conference.
April 26, 2017: Reprise of "DITA vs DITA-OT: Who gets the credit, who gets the blame?" -- this time with more credit (and more blame!!) -- at CMS / DITA North America in San Diego, CA.
November 14, 2016: "DITA vs DITA-OT: Who gets the credit, who gets the blame?" at DITA Europe in Munich, Germany.
November 13, 2016: DITA Open Toolkit Day 2015, organized by SyncroSoft, in Munich, Germany. Recordings and slides at http://www.oxygenxml.com/events/2016/dita-ot_day.html. My sessions included:
- I18N A1D D5T: W1O D2S W2T? (Internationalization and DITA-OT: Who Does What?)
- Testing in DITA-OT (together with Jarno Elovirta)
- Long term DITA-OT Planning (together with Kris Eberlein)
- Closing panel: state of DITA Open Toolkit
April 4, 2016: "DITA-OT 2.x: Discover what’s new in Toolkit Two" at CMS / DITA North America in Reston, Virginia. Slides posted at https://www.slideshare.net/RobertAnderson151/ditaot-2x-discover-whats-new-in-toolkit-two. Note: probably the most fun I've ever had giving a presentation.
November 16, 2015: "The Keys to the (DITA) Kingdom: Using Indirection without Losing Your Way" (Co-presentation with Kris Eberlein about DITA and Keys) at DITA Europe in Munich, Germany.
November 15, 2015: DITA Open Toolkit Day 2015, organized by SyncroSoft, in Munich, Germany. Recordings and slides at http://www.oxygenxml.com/events/2015/dita-ot_day.html; sessions included
- DITA-OT Patterns and Anti-patterns
- Lightning talk: Why "startcmd" is not your friend
- Quo vadis? Panel discussion on the state of DITA-OT
October 19, 2015: Lavacon in New Orleans (http://www.lavacon.org/2015/). Co-presented with Kris Eberlein, "Keeping the Content Train on the Tracks (and on Topic)".
November 20, 2014: DITA Open Toolkit Day 2014, organized by SyncroSoft, in Munich, Germany. Video and slides at http://www.oxygenxml.com/events/2014/dita-ot_day.html. Sessions included:
- Extending the DITA Open Toolkit: How crazy can you get?
- Quo vadis? Panel discussion on the state of DITA-OT
November 18, 2014: "DITA Through the Ages" (DITA past, present, and future) at DITA Europe in Munich, Germany.
August 6, 2014: DITA 1.3 Webinar, sponsored by OASIS. Available as a PDF download and as a full recording at youtube (including Q&A)
April 30, 2014: "DITA-OT Panel Discussion: Preparing for the DITA-OT 2.0 release" at Content Management Strategies / DITA North America in Seattle, WA.
April 16, 2014: History of DITA and DITA 1.3 at the Central Texas DITA User Group (a look at DITA from version 1.0 to the upcoming 1.3).
April 17, 2013: DITA Open Toolkit Panel Discussion at Content Management Strategies / DITA North America in Providence, RI.
April 15, 2013: "DITA 1.3: A Look Over the Horizon" at Content Management Strategies / DITA North America in Providence, RI.
March 28, 2012: Presentation to the Boston and RTP DITA User Groups on Publishing with the DITA Open Toolkit. Thanks to the RTP group for creating a recording of the presentation ... which is no longer available 10+ years on so I've removed the link.
December 7, 2011: Presentation to the Boston and RTP DITA User Groups on Overriding the DITA Open Toolkit with Plug-ins. For samples (updated repeatedly since 2011), see Sample DITA-OT plug-ins.
May 16, 2011: The STC Annual Conference in Sacramento, CA. Presenting "DITA Specialization: why would I do that?"
May 4, 2010: The STC Annual Conference in Dallas, TX. Presenting "<nearly/> Hands Free DITA". As part of the presentation, I used the following resources:
- Metadita skin for WinAnt Echidna: metadita_skin.zip. Unzip and read metadita_skin_README.txt for details.
- Sample Ant build for branding output: metadita_brand.zip. Unzip directly to your DITA-OT install directory and read metadita/README.txt for details.
February 24, 2010: Presentation to Boston and RTP DITA User Groups on DITA 1.2
October 27, 2009: Lavacon in New Orleans (http://www.lavacon.org/)
May 3-6, 2009: DITA 1.2 presentation to the STC Annual Conference in Atlanta, GA
November 6-8, 2008: The 2008 Lavacon Conference in Honolulu, Hawaii
August, 2008: Remote presentation for RTP and Austin DITA User Groups
November, 2007: Silicon Valley DITA Interest group presented on Extending the DITA-OT
October 28-30, 2007: The 2007 Lavacon Conference in New Orleans, LA
October 4-6, 2007: DITA 2007 in Raleigh, NC. 3 presentation sessions:
- Installing and using the DITA-OT
- Specialization from Scratch
- Extending the DITA-OT with plug-ins
May 13-16, 2007: The STC Conference in Minneapolis, MN
March 23-25, 2006: DITA 2006 in Raleigh, NC

Publications

Does blogging count? Sure, and it's generally more fun. Lots of DITA and DITA-OT related blogs in the DITA Thoughts area.
Migrating HTML to DITA (Part 1 and Part 2)
"Publishing Global Information with DITA", article for IBM Globalization
Subject classification with DITA and SKOS
Implementing a DITA plublishing solution without abandoning your current publishing system investments
"DITA and the localization process", in the October/November 2006 issue of Multilingual magazine