US S1000D Event in October 2009

An email Received here on Friday notified me of an S1000D event in the US. Called the 2009 S1000D User's Forum it is due to take place between 12th and 15th of October in Hilton Head, South Carolina, USA. It is being organised by the Aerospace Industries Association, one of the bodies responsible for the maintenance of the S1000D Specification.

Spread over the four days there are, as usual, several sessions and tracks.

Tracks

Day one is mainly set for tutorials and it will be interesting to see what topics they are to cover.

On day two one of the Tracks is focused on "Creating the Vision for Integrated Logist" (For those of you not familiar with this last word I looked it up to discover that it means "To perform logistics functions or processes. The act of planning, organizing and managing activities that provide goods or services" There is even a verb "to logist" - for those who wish to look further I have provided a link to the online source of my information at the bottom of this item.)

At long last it would seem that years after Def Stan 00-60 in the UK documented the links between the ILS world in the guise of Mil Std 1388, the S1000D specification and S2000M specification there is a public focus on the interoperability of these and other specifications. Sessions are given over to the linking of these and other specifications (S3000L, S4000M & S5000F. The session which covers the links between the various S Specifications ends in one called "How does the technical publication production benefit from the ASD suite of ILS Standards?" If there is not already one perhaps this session should form the basis of a specification in its own right which documents properly the links between them.

As one might expect there are reports (on the morning of day three) into updates on the progress(?) of S1000D.

Link

The above are some of the programme sessions that have caught my eye on a quick read through but if you wish to look at this more closely then the link to the 'front page' is "http://guest.cvent.com/EVENTS/Info/Invitation.aspx"

Attendance

I have heard reports from contacts that attendance of both the ATA and the previous S1000D conference was down from normal. I guess that if this is the case it reflects the hard economic times that we are going through.

Attendance at the full conference is shown as $450 (for a limited time) but of course one has to get there - a quick search reveals that from the UK a return flight would cost around $750.

Here in the UK the people who would most benefit from exposure to a conference of this type are employed by relatively small companies (e.g. < 100 staff). There is just not the spare money in circulation here to pay for this visit or even to warrant the loss of production which would happen from a person attending this event. UK technical publications contractors tend to be very lean organisations where every penny counts and where generally money is spent for the support of a contract.

My experience has been that any attempt by a contractor to introduce 'efficiencies' has been met with a corresponding demand from their clients to reduce the rates that they pay for the work to be done. I agree that this is short sighted. I would be interested to hear if this observation is still relevant (it was fairly recently supported in a conversation that I had).

I guess that this conundrum is something that we have to mull over and try to come up with some suitable answer.