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The barbarians are at the gate (keynote)

The arc of publishing is the slow destruction of gatekeepers. The invention of writing took away the voice of the author or storyteller. The printing press separated formatting and copying. And today, content consumers have broken through the last gate with AI. Instead of gratefully accepting a document from a benevolent publisher, the content consumer can repackage content into a different format and a different language. They can ask for more or less detail, additional examples, or targeted information.

In this session, Sarah O’Keefe answers critical content ops questions. How do we respond to this new development in our role as content experts? What does it mean to lose control over content delivery?

Session details:

• Monday, October 26th
• 4 pm EDT

From chaos to clarity: Streamlining regulated global content (case study)

By early 2026, Insulet expanded sales of its Omnipod insulin pumps to over 20 countries and almost as many languages. The rapidly growing customer base, continually expanding product lines, and increasing number of regulatory requirements significantly outpaced the inefficient desktop publishing processes left over from the early days of medical device manufacturing.

Insulet made a strategic move to DITA in late 2025 to centralize content, eliminate manual work, and streamline production through intelligent content reuse, rich metadata, release management, and automated publishing.

In this session, Leah Catania (Insulet) and Bill Swallow (Scriptorium) discuss the factors that led to the transition to DITA and explore the benefits of such a move in a highly regulated industry. Leah and Bill break down the challenges faced, efficiencies gained, and lessons learned along the way, including:

• Navigating the maze of Good “X” Practice (GxP) requirements – for the content itself and the tools involved.
• Mapping completely unstructured content and inconsistent formatting to structured content with templatized outputs.
• Consolidating dozens of different baseline guides into a handful of “global” English baselines through content reuse and conditional filtering.
• Adapting content written for printed guides to be used in a mobile-first HTML output for in-app help, while still maintaining as much content reuse as possible.

Session details:

• Wednesday, October 28th
• 9:30 am EDT

Check out our booth!

Our team will be exhibiting at LavaCon. Make sure to stop by for swag, chocolate, and more!

Register for LavaCon 2026 on the conference website.