[net2-wg] future direction for net2

[Omprakash Gnawali]

Dear net2 members,

As you know, the net2 agenda for the last few months has been
dominated by work related to the Collection Tree Protocol. Now that
CTP design, specification, and implementation is nearing its
completion, we need to decide two things:

1. Topics net2 should pursue.

In the past we have had proposals on Zigbee compliant stack and
specification of a better data link layer. I am sure there are many
other items you would like net2 to address. This is a good time to
bring all those on the table, prioritize the tasks, and allocate the
volunteers.

2. Organization of the group.

Our work on collection has not only dominated the agenda of net2 but
also made it difficult for other efforts to get any traction. As a
result people uninterested in collection were not able to
contribute. Moving forward, I propose:

- Recruiting researchers who publish papers on network protocols and
help them publish user-ready protocols in TinyOS. This would mean net2
would evolve into a group of people experienced in networking that is
ready to provide encouragement and feedback to external contributors
to produce more networking options for TinyOS. For example, if someone
wrote a paper in networking and wants to provide it to other
researchers, that person would think of net2 as the place to turn to
to get pointers and feedback. There is no reason why this model would
not be applicable even if it is software that would eventually go into
contrib and not lib/net.

- If we come across a project such as CTP that is long-term and
involving a lot of people in the future, spin off a sub group or a
different working group so that rest of the members are able to engage
in activities that interest them.

I will appreciate your additional observations of the group thus far
and suggestions on how to manage our work in the future. Please do not
forget to think of topics that interest you the most and send them to
the list or to me.

Thanks.

- om_p