OMG !
No, that’s not the acronym you are (likely) thinking of. That’s the Object Management Group, which just held its quarterly Technical Meeting, in Burlingame (near San Francisco).
As a rather turbulent week draws to an end, I’m walking through a slightly rainy San Francisco to take in some more local air.
At the meeting I broke a couple of records. One, notably, for having brought a (preexisting) set of specifications through the OMG standardization process to full adoption within only 9 months. (We started the initial RFC process at the March meeting in Reston.)
The second, for being the first to submit specifications using DocBook. While this has been a “supported” format (together with FrameMaker), I’m apparently the first one to actually using it in this context.
Most people still submit MS Word documents (yuck !), resulting in a lot of post-processing by OMG’s own editor to massage the text into OMG / ISO - compliant formats. As a result, the submitters are no longer able to maintain their own specifications, instead requiring OMG’s technical writer(s) / editor(s) to apply their patches for them. What a wasteful process.
By using DocBook, our community is now enabled / empowered to maintain the standard ourselves, which makes everyone involved, as well as (and in particular) those who no longer have to be involved, very happy.
On Wednesday I met with a couple of my colleagues, who happen to live in the area, to celebrate the completion of the above work, as well as to talk about the future.
I also took the opportunity to sneak in a few hours to visit the Muir Woods National Monument, which, by exposing me to an entirely different scale of space and time, relativates many of the other things running through my head.
Now I’m sitting in a *$ (read: Starbucks) as I have a few hours before my plane takes me back home.