David Balzan
United Kingdom
David Balzan is Head of Technical Services for Entity Group. He is responsible for system design and architecture of the major solutions that Entity delivers. David was involved in the early stages of the project providing the clarity of vision. Once the concept was proved, he managed the development team. He and his team spent many hours to drive this project through from theory and a blank sheet of paper into a full production system capable of functioning in the real world.
Presentation: How to Unlock Legacy Technical Information and Reduce Localisation Costs Across International Markets—A Case Study
France Baril
Canada
France Baril, owner of Architextus Inc., is a DITA/XML consultant as well as a Documentation Architect who helps organizations analyze their content and processes, select tools, learn about DITA and/or XML, manage the change process, and develop supporting material (from DTDs or schemas to XSL transformations).
She has a unique background with a BA in Communication from University of Ottawa and a BSc in Computer Science from Université de Sherbrooke. She worked as a Documentation Architect for 5 years at IXIASOFT, where she served as Product Manager for their DITA CMS Framework. Before that, France has worked as a multimedia developer, a trainer, and a technical documentation specialist.
Presentation: DITA and BPMN: How to enhance Information Architecture
Thomas Barthel
Belgium
 Thomas holds the position of Senior Business Development Manager at SDL Structure Content Technologies and is responsible for Sales & Business Development in Benelux, D-A-CH and southern Europe. Thomas holds a Bachelor degree in Informatics and has over 15 years experience in Sales and Sales Management positions mainly in the CIM (Computer Integrated Manufacturing) and PLM space within international Operations like HP and Autodesk.
Presentation: Dynamic Publishing: The Ultimate End-Game
Of DITA Deployments
George Bina
Romania
 George Bina is one of the founders of Syncro Soft, the company that develops oXygen XML Editor. He has more than 10 years experience in working with XML and related technologies including XML-related projects, oXygen XML Editor and participation in open source projects, the most notable being oNVDL—an open source implementation of the NVDL standard, a project that is now merged into Jing.
Presentation: Portable Implementation of DITA Reusable Components
Anne Bovard
USA
 Anne Bovard Grosvenor is a Consultant
at Comtech
Services. She
develops
Information
Models and
stylesheets
and assists
in content
inventories,
customer
studies, and business cases. She also
serves as instructor for Comtech’s
series of interactive DITA workshops.
Anne has a BS in Biology from Virginia
Polytechnic Institute.
Presentation: Modular Publishing: Reusing styles across publications
Berry Braster
The Netherlands
 Berry Braster is the Sales and Marketing Director of Tedopres, a company specialized in providing services for technical content. Berry has a background in quality assurance and regulatory affairs and has assisted many organizations with their global strategy for product and manual compliance. He has been with Tedopres for 8 years, during which he has managed the implementation of Tedopres' controlled language solution HyperSTE for many companies in various industries.
Presentation: How Controlled English, Simplified Illustrations, Augmented Reality and DITA Form the Future of Content
Don Bridges
USA
Don Bridges is the Manager of Commercial Technical Documentation projects at Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL). DCL is a leader in managing and implementing large-scale, complex data conversions. He has been with DCL for almost 10 years and manages activities in Aerospace, Life Sciences, Manufacturing, Semiconductor, Software, and Telecom accounts. Prior to joining DCL, Don gained more than 15 years experience in the technical documentation field, including positions at Pratt & Whitney and Enigma, among others.
Presentation: DITA Implementation
Kristina Brinck
Sweden
Kristina is Information Architect in the ITT corporate Global Enterprise Content Management (GECM) Shared Services. She trains local information developers, tests and maintains the corporate information model and sets up implementation processes for new information areas.
Kristina has a University Diploma in Swedish Language Consultancy from Stockholm University. She has been working as a plain language expert and certified Information Mapping instructor since 1996. Her focus is generally effective documentation including methods for analysing, structuring and presenting user friendly outputs, and collaboration processes for accuracy in content.
Presentation: Using the Task Analysis for Effective Documentation
Thilo Buchholz
Germany
 For many years Dr. Thilo Buchholz is heading the team that is implementing and optimizing an XML-based authoring infrastructure for SAP Education.
He started his carrier at SAP as instructor customer training teaching SAP's programming language for customers and consultants.
Prior to SAP AG, Dr. Thilo Buchholz did his PHD in Mathematics at the Potsdam University. He is married and has two children.
Presentation: From proprietary XML to DITA
Pia Chamberlain
USA
 Pia Chamberlain is an Information Architect at NetApp in Sunnyvale, California. She has been working in DITA for over three years. As NetApp’s Condition Maven, she is responsible for the Information Engineering department’s condition architecture, processes, internal documentation and training. Prior to becoming a technical communication professional, she worked in software engineering and engineering management for nine years.
Presentation: It Takes a Village: Managing Publications with Many Contributors
Sissi Closs
Germany
Sissi Closs, Professor of Information and Media Technology at the Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences, is co-owner and Managing Director of the Munich-based companies Comet Computer GmbH and Comet Communication GmbH. She is one of Germany's leading experts in XML and online documentation and has been teaching DITA since 2003.
Presentation: A Unified Process for Authoring Technical and Learning Content with DITA Based on Activity Theory
Frank Closset
Belgium
 Frank Closset is CTO at SDL Structure Content Technologies. Frank carries the overall responsibility for driving product development and getting the overall content management experience to the next level. Frank has been around in the Component Content Management space for more than a decade now. During that time, he worked all around the world with global organizations and integrated the SDL Trisoft Component Content Management solution into their tool chain and processes. Frank is a big advocate and early adopter of DITA and packaged DITA into SDL Trisoft CCM even before it became an OASIS standard. Frank holds two Master’s degrees: one in Applied Economics, one in Business Informatics, both from the University of Leuven, Belgium.
Presentation: Dynamic Publishing: The Ultimate End-Game
Of DITA Deployments
Sheila D'Annunzio
France
Sheila D'Annunzio is the Head of Technical Documentation for STMicroelectronics, one of the world’s leading semiconductor manufacturers. Her principle role is to develop and implement new strategies for managing technical content intended for distribution outside the company.
A latecomer in the technical documentation field, Sheila started her career as a physicist working with particle accelerators, and came into documentation following a move abroad and a career break to bring up children.
With over 10 years of experience authoring and managing documents in a large corporation, she understands very well the issues facing documentation today and believes that DITA is the best solution to address them.
She is a member of the OASIS DITA Semiconductor Information Design Subcommittee.
Presentation: Getting started: How to convince your management to move to DITA
Marie-Louise Flacke
Belgium
 Marie-Louise Flacke is a graduate of the American University of Paris (Technical Writing Program).
Marie-Louise's professional skills and interests range from DITA authoring to bid writing, readability indices and eye-tracking. She also provides technical writing courses at various French Universities, focusing on minimalism and usability testing. She is currently involved in a major upgrade of the Engineering Support Manual at EUROCONTROL, Maastricht (NL).
Presentation: Handling Conflicts Between DITA and Warnings
Mark Forry
USA
Mark Forry is a senior technical writer and information architect at NetApp in Sunnyvale, California. Mark has been working with DITA since 2005 after “seeing the light” at an STC conference, and he contributed to the first DITA and CMS pilot projects at NetApp. With 20 years experience in technical publications, Mark has also developed UNIX user, administrator, and API documentation for The SCO Group.
Presentation: It Takes a Village: Managing Publications with Many Contributors
Richard Foskett
United Kingdom
Richard Foskett has been with Entity Group for 11 years.
Entity Group is an IT solution provider with a specialism in master data management across a variety of business sectors.
After early experience in manufacturing and construction, Richard has worked extensively in the automotive, and finance and insurance sectors as an operational manager driving organisation change and process improvement and frequently buying IT services, before choosing to take up the challenge of becoming a solution provider.
Presentation: How to Unlock Legacy Technical Information and Reduce Localisation Costs Across International Markets—A Case Study
Vishal George
India
Vishal George is a Senior Information Developer at IBM. He is interested in providing easy solutions to time-consuming and repetitive tasks, making lives of Authors and Editors easier.
Presentation: Dynamic DITA Content Generation for the Product Messages from the Source Files
Jack Gibson
USA
Jack Gibson has worked for Tekelec for 10 years. He is currently Manager of Customer Documentation. Jack was the Project Manager on the team assigned to the initial conversion from FrameMaker to their Vasont Content Management System. He has developed and deployed a wide range of innovative system enhancements with global impact during his tenure at Tekelec. Jack has managed the CMS since it was converted in 2007. He holds both a Bachelor’s degree and a Master’s degree from the University of Virginia and resides with his wife and two children in rural North Carolina, USA.
Presentation: DITA Implementation
Joe Gollner
Canada
 Joe Gollner is the Chief Solutions Architect at Stilo International where he leads a team of specialists in the design, development, and delivery of state-of-the-art content management and publishing solutions. In the last several years, many of these solutions have focused upon leveraging DITA to address a wide range of challenges. He has worked in the content management market, specializing in the deployment of open content standards as the foundation for large-scale enterprise systems, for over 20 years. During these years, he has designed and managed the implementation of dozens of systems for customers around the world who depend upon high-quality, cost-effective technical information. He was educated in a wide range of subjects at Queens University (B.A.) and the University of Oxford (M.Phil.) and has completed graduate programs in project management, business analysis, and knowledge management.
Presentation: Making DITA Work
Doug Gorman
USA
Doug Gorman is the CEO of Simply XML, a software and services company that helps companies adopt XML throughout the enterprise. On a stand-alone basis or in conjunction with its Web-based training program, Doug is helping organizations adopt DITA inside and outside of tech pubs. He has held executive level and staff positions at Information Mapping, Computer Corporation of America, Braxton Associates, Digital Equipment Corporation and the Federal Reserve Bank. Doug received a BA in psychology from Colby College and an MS in Management from MIT.
Presentation: Making DITA Work Across the Enterprise
Jang Graat
The Netherlands
Jang F.M. Graat studied Physics, Psychology, and Philosophy and has used his exceptional talent for explaining technological concepts as a marketing manager, technical author, and trainer for more than 20 years. He has delivered hundreds of presentations and training courses in Europe, America, and the Far East. In the past six years, he has worked mainly as a freelance tech writer for machine manufacturing companies.
Presentation: Get a Grip!—DITA Constraints
Nick Gregory
United Kingdom
Nick Gregory is a Senior Technical Consultant at Entity Group. Nick has been in the IT industry for twenty + years. Nick has very wide technical experience and has worked across the following industry sectors—automotive, retail, education, construction and services. His speciality is to be down and dirty with the data.
Nick is an accomplished architect with practical business process experience ranges from system controls for building management, retail systems, e-commerce, complex vehicle leasing and management, supply chain, customer relationship management, as well as content management, localisation and vehicle diagnostics.
Presentation: How to Unlock Legacy Technical Information and Reduce Localisation Costs Across International Markets—A Case Study
Alex Griessel
South Africa
Alex Griessel resides in Gauteng, South Africa and spends most of his time experimenting and evangelizing various technologies relating to content and information management. He has spent most of his professional career developing custom information systems for various companies. He is the owner of DITALabs, a company that specializes in the integration of DITA to popular content managment systems.
Presentation: How to Unlock Legacy Technical Information and Reduce Localisation Costs Across International Markets—A Case Study
JoAnn Hackos
USA
 Dr. JoAnn Hackos is President of Comtech Services Inc., a content management and information-development consultancy she founded in 1978. She is Director of The Center for Information-Development Management (CIDM), a membership organization focused on best practices in content management and information development. Dr. Hackos is a founding member with IBM of the Technical Committee for DITA at OASIS and co-editor of the DITA specification. She has been a leader in content management for technical information for more than 30 years, helping organizations move to structured authoring, minimalism, and single sourcing. She introduced content management and single sourcing to the Society for Technical Communication (STC) in 1996 and has been instrumental in developing awareness worldwide of the DITA initiative. She hosts or keynotes numerous industry conferences and workshops in the field.
She has authored Information Development: Managing your Documentation Projects, Portfolio, and People (Wiley 2006), Content Management for Dynamic Web Delivery (Wiley 2002), Managing Your Documentation Projects (Wiley 1994), Standards for Online Communication co-authored with Dawn Stevens (Wiley 1997), and co-authored with Ginny Redish User and Task Analysis for Interface Design (Wiley 1998). Her latest book is Introduction to DITA: The Arbortext Edition (Comtech 2007).
Presentation: Coming soon.
George Hayden
USA
 George has spoken at numerous international conferences such as "Training", "On-line learning" and "Info-strategies." George has worked in the industry for over 30 years and has a Masters Degree in Instructional Technology from the Rochester Institute of Technology.
With the help of industry pioneer Gloria Geary, George transformed traditional training into EPSS service guidance systems for over 20,000 Xerox Engineers worldwide.
His creative approach to the principles of DITA design for the reuse of topics in technical documentation and training has earned him many STC awards.
Presentation: psssst!—The Secret of Great DITA is Really About STM and LTM
Nick Hill
United Kingdom
Nick Hill is a Requirements Manager for Developer Documentation at Nokia (Finland). In his technical communications career, one of his main focuses has been the challenges of developer documentation, although many other kinds of interesting projects have come up along the way. Spending his entire career based in Finland, he has also had cause to look into the issues at the intersection of documentation and localization. In addition, he spent a number of years involved in quality assurance issues.
Presentation: Using DITA in Massive Open Source Projects
Gjertrud Wiggen Kamstrup
Norway
Gjertrud W. Kamstrup is the ERP Project Coordinator at Visma Software in Oslo, responsible for the management of the DITA documentation project. Since completing a degree in computer science engineering in Norway and a Masters in computer science in Germany, Gjertrud has worked in a number of information technology and management roles. First she worked as a research scientist focusing on text generation and computational linguistics. Later she worked with classifications and open standards in IT for the health sector. She is currently working in the software industry with a particular interest in establishing and coordinating production processes such as software documentation.
Presentation: DITA Implementation in a Geographically Dispersed, ESL Team
Nolwenn Kerzreho
France
Nolwenn Kerzreho is a contract Technical Communicator at Technicolor IPTV & VoIP, where she leads the DITA adoption effort as a trainer and information architect. Her duties include implementing industrial standards, managing the documentation process and administrating the information management systems (CMS and Wikis).
Nolwenn is also an adjunct teacher at the Training Center for Translators-localizers, Terminologists and Technical Writers (CFTTR), with special interests in user-oriented documentation, international standards and XML-based authoring systems.
Presentation: Handling Conflicts Between DITA and Warnings
Santhosh Krishnamoorthy
India
Santhosh Krishnamoorthy is a TXSeries test lead and works in the area of tooling, inter system communications and Java technologies. He has written various articles and is a contributing author at IBM developerWorks. He also has a keen interest in the area of Information Development and has implemented solutions around the same in his organization.
Presentation: Dynamic DITA Content Generation for the Product Messages from the Source Files
Eric Kuhnen
USA
Eric Kuhnen has more than 20 years of experience in product research, development and management. Mr. Kuhnen was most recently responsible for competitive positioning, product marketing, and product management at Astoria Software, GoRemote (acquired by iPass), and Oracle Corporation. Since 1990, Mr. Kuhnen has managed the launch of nine different software products across four different disciplines: on-demand, enterprise, equipment control, and government. Products that Mr. Kuhnen has launched have set sales records in the first years of their operation, and one was awarded 2002 Software Product of the Year by Semiconductor International magazine. Mr. Kuhnen presently manages global operations, product management, pre-sales and marketing for Astoria Software, a division of TransPerfect, Inc. Mr. Kuhnen holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Brigham Young University.
Presentation: Translation-Enabled Content Management
Frank Miller
USA
 Frank Miller is a Senior Consultant and Project Manager at Comtech Services, Inc., assisting companies with their information design, process efficiency, and tools and implementation needs. Frank has more than 10 years experience in publishing and currently manages and implements enterprise content management solutions. Frank also guides corporations through their information architecture process. He has experience in conducting and analyzing benchmarking studies and information redesign for content management. He also serves as instructor for Comtech’s series of interactive DITA workshops.
Presentation: Coming soon.
Vikram Nanwani
Sweden
Vikram Nanwani is the GECM Manager for ITT - in effect the Global Technical Publications Manager. He joined the GECM team in early 2008, where his first task was to complete a DITA pilot project, establish a team, and develop processes for the "production phase." His role now is to expand the roll out XML-based content management in ITT having established it as a core business process for the technical documentation at the Fluid businesses within ITT. He has been at ITT in Sweden for just under 4 years, where he started off as a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, leading a number of global business development projects.
Prior to ITT, he was working at a global manufacturing company based in the UK, where his role in a small research and development team allowed him to take the role of project manager, technical writer, software developer, sales person, and a lot more. Vikram is a Chartered Manufacturing Engineer.
Presentation: Closing the Loop on the Business Case
Mark Poston
United Kingdom
Mark Poston is a senior technical consultant with over 13 years in content and publishing. He has gained a broad knowledge and understanding of the publishing requirements of clients. As technologies have changed and moved forward, the solutions he has worked on have reflected these changes. He is now heavily involved in the analysis, design, and implementation of XML publishing solutions and is an active member of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee and Enterprise Business Documents and Web Sub Committees and the DITA Open Toolkit project.
Presentation: Internal and External Communities: A practical look at modern content delivery
David Reid
The Netherlands
 David has been involved with documentation solutions for more than 20 years. He has recently joined Thales Nederland to work on their S1000D implementation, defining the Business Rules and the Style and also writing DataModules, XSLT and XSL FO to transform S1000D into PDF, HTML and IETP manuals. Before that, David was with NXP Semiconductors (ex Philips) for 9 years, developing documentation solutions and pioneering the change to database XML and DITA document generation. He has a wide experience of solving documentation problems.
Presentation: Acronyms and Abbreviations in DITA
Tony Self
Australia
Tony Self has worked as a technical communicator for 30 years, with the last 20 of those years specifically in the areas of online help systems, computer-based training, and electronic documents. In 1993, Tony founded HyperWrite, a hypertext and technical documentation company based in Melbourne, Australia. The majority of his work involves providing online and Internet strategy advice, innovative solutions, and specialised training for customers in Australia and other parts of the world. Tony is an Adjunct Teaching Fellow in the Technical Communication program at Swinburne University in Melbourne and holds a Graduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning and a Graduate Diploma in Technical Communication. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicators (UK), chair of the OASIS DITA Help Subcommittee, and an enthusiastic promoter of structured-authoring approaches!
Presentation: DITA Implementation in a Geographically Dispersed, ESL Team
Keith Schengili-Roberts
Canada
Keith Schengili-Roberts is the Manager of Documentation & Localization for the Graphics Products division of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) located near Toronto, Canada. Prior to this role he worked as its Information Architect, redesigning the documentation deliverables and the processes behind them, and led the transition of his group to DITA XML. His group was the first company to implement Ixiasoft’s DITA CMS software, which has been used in production since February 2007. Keith is also an award-winning lecturer on Information Architecture and Information Management at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information Sciences. He is also on the steering committee for the Semiconductor DITA Implementers Group (SDIG), an informal monthly online forum designed for other “birds of a feather” who are already using DITA in their semiconductor technical documentation workflow. Keith is the author of four professional technical titles, the most recent being Core CSS, 2nd Edition (available at the conference bookstore).
Presentation: (Almost) Four Years On: Metrics, ROI, and Other Stories from a Mature DITA CMS Installation
Paul Ross
United Kingdom
Paul Ross is a Technology Architect at Nokia (London) with the System Documentation team where he finds DITA is his friend. He is responsible for the technical health of the tools produced by that team that are used in one of the largest open source projects ever. Before Nokia he worked for Symbian as Technology Architect for their XML publishing system.
He has a background in production engineering, aviation, oil exploration, photojournalism, writing and documentation management. As a software engineer of many years, he still has his original first edition of K&R. He is a contributor to many open source projects, not all of them to do with documentation and some of them just for fun!
He holds a BSc in Engineering from Leicester University and a MSc in Robotics and Computer Controlled Automation from Imperial College, London.
Presentation: Using DITA in Massive Open Source Projects
Frank Shipley
France
Frank Shipley is CTO at Componize Software. After a long and rich career in the automotive industry, Frank worked for several years as a freelance consultant and training instructor specialized in XML technologies and enterprise content management. Frank’s interest in DITA dates back to 2005, and he has been authoring content with DITA ever since. Frank co-founded Componize Software in 2008 with the objective of commercializing a new and innovative framework for XML content and Component Content Management.
Presentation: Taking DITA To Infinity and Beyond
Gunthilde Sohn
Germany
Gunthilde Sohn is co-founder and managing director of instinctools. Since 2001 instinctools offers software and services in information management. As a member of Eclipse Foundation they provide comprehensive consulting and implementation services in the areas of Eclipse, single-sourcing and DITA. With DITAworks they offer an end-to-end authoring platform for structured documentation. Gunthilde holds a diploma in mathematics from the University of Ulm and has been working many years at IBM in several management positions of national and international development projects.
Presentation: DITA Specialization: Tools for visual support
Alexej Spas
Germany
Alexej Spas is the Senior IT Manager at *instinctools GmbH. He has many years of experience in Java and Eclipse-based software development and more than 7 years in strategic development of the outsourcing division and managing international projects.
He is responsible for DITAworks product development and DITA-based solutions for instinctools customers. Alexej holds a Diploma in Physics and Automation Technology from Grodno State University, Belarus and an MBA with specialization in International Management from Pforzheim Business School, Germany.
Presentation: DITA Specialization: Tools for visual support
Hal Trent
USA
 Hal Trent serves as a Consultant, Stylesheet Developer, and Web Information Manager at Comtech Services, Inc. He has experience in XML CMS implementations for a variety of businesses and academic institutions and is currently focusing on SVG and DITA. He also leads frequent workshops related to DITA and XML. Hal has a BS in Biology from Roanoke College and an MS in Information Systems from DePaul University.
Presentation: Modular Publishing: Reusing styles across publications
Carl Yao
China
Carl Yao is the Executive Vice President of Global Strategy at CSOFT. He heads strategic planning and business development, with the goal of leveraging and expanding CSOFT’s globalization solutions to optimize business outcomes and help customers extract greater value from CSOFT’s offerings. Prior to CSOFT, Yao was the principal architect for the development of the world’s first multi-lingual speech engine that used natural human voice to synthesize speech at YAOS Technologies. He also served as the CTO for Animation Technologies based in Boston, Massachusetts. Yao has a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics and Computer Science from Whitman College in Washington State, and a Masters in Computer Science from Brown University.
Presentation: How to Become an Expert Terminologist in 30 Minutes (Without Spreadsheets)
Su-Laine Yeo
Canada
 Su-Laine Yeo is a Solutions Consultant for XMetaL, and has worked in the software development industry since 1996 as a technical consultant, technical communicator, interaction designer, and software trainer. Since joining JustSystems in 2003, Su-Laine has designed user interfaces for DITA features in XMetaL Author and has trained information architects, writers, and managers on DITA and XMetaL. She is an active member of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee.
Presentation: DITA Localization for Managers
Thomas Zschocke
Germany
Thomas Zschocke is currently an academic officer with the United Nations University in Bonn, Germany. With more than 10 years of experience as an instructional designer in higher education and in international development he understands the issues facing the design of learning resources in different academic and professional communities and believes that DITA is the best solution to address them. In addition to DITA, his interests include learning objects, learning repositories, ontologies and similar semantic technologies in educational domains. Thomas holds a doctoral degree in education from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA.
Presentation: A Unified Process for Authoring Technical and Learning Content with DITA Based on Activity Theory
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