[Tinyos-alliance] Membership and structure

[Philippe Bonnet]

Dear all,

In general, my position is that we should follow an incremental approach. The evolution of TinyOS has been a great success. We should build on that.

- Membership:

(1) I believe we should not change the way individuals get developer access.
People send requests. Get approved/rejected. No fees. They become members of the alliance.

(2) I am not sure we need corporate membership. It all depends on the alliance structure and on funding. It might be that the structural costs are low enough so that corporate membership is not justified. We might get a long way with sponsoring around TinyOS events. In any case, I do not think money should buy technical influence.

- Structure

I think we should stick to the formula that has garanteed the success of TinyOS with:
- a steering comittee that follows up on David's role
- an office that follows up on Kristin's role
- working groups: a group of developers that discuss interfaces, implement code, write TEPs.

I believe that the steering comittee should be organized like a conference steering comittee or journal board, where co-optation is used to design new comitee members, comittee members are in place for a given period (say 3 years), a 1/3 of the members are renewed each year.

The office should be the responsibility of one or several persons, possibly paid by the alliance.

The working groups are responsible for the technical aspects (including a stable release). Following today's model, the steering comitte creates working groups. A member, designed by the steering comittee is in charge of animating the activities within the working group. I guess that the working group lifecycle will determine the form of organization of the working group. Working group leaders report to the steering comittee as well as to the TinyOS community at large (today's TTX).

Best regards,
Philippe.