Whether it’s flamenco dancing, fine food, or content management, when Pamela Kostur gets passionate about something, it’s readily apparent. In addition to being an accomplished chef, Pamela is also an avid flamenco dancer, studying and performing with the Arte Flamenco school in Toronto.
Pamela’s passion is clear in her work, as well. After all, she muses, how did the “content” in content management get left out of the loop? If the purpose is to manage content, why do so many projects focus on the technology around the content, and not on the content itself? Anyone who has heard Pamela speak is very clear on where she stands on that issue, and her white paper, Whose Content Is It Anyways?: An Argument for Modular Writing articulates her views with eloquence.

She absolutely loves working with content, particularly when content is being restructured as part of a content management implementation. She loves cleaning it up, rewriting it, re-structuring it, and creating guidelines so that others can continue to write the content consistently. Pamela always begins with analysis and finds that in most cases, similar types of documents and information products are written inconsistently. The first task is to bring structure to the general chaos, defining structures for similar types of documents and information products, and defining writing guidelines to support those structures. Kostur explains that structure still doesn’t tell authors how to write the content that goes into the structure. That’s where the writing guidelines come in. Whether starting from scratch or working with existing content, defining the structure - and how to write to the structure - are critical. It’s a lot like choreography, she says. She’s getting the content ready to dance on the stage of the World Wide Web, or wherever else it may be asked to perform.

Don’t miss Pamela’s presentation, Writing Reusable Content to Support Content Models, and her half-day workshop, Writing For Reuse: Learning to Write Modular Content for Reuse at Documentation and Training West 2008.