[Tinyos-alliance] Draft One-Pager (5/2 bridge 1-415-692-0828 ext: 8604 pin: 3987#)

[Matt Welsh]

David,

Overall this is very strong and explains concisely what we are trying to
accomplish.

I would consider omitting the various references to Apache, IETF,
Zigbee, W3C, etc. since they can lead to confusion. For example, if
someone has a different understanding of how the IETF or Zigbee Alliance
works, there could be a misunderstanding.

I would simply say what the TinyOS Alliance is without direct reference
to other similar or dissimilar organizations.

Finally, it is not immediately clear from reading this what a 'Member'
is. I understand 'Contributing Member', but why would anyone just be a
'Member'?

Matt

On Tue, 2006-05-02 at 08:46 -0700, David E. Culler wrote:
> Here is a draft for the one pager.  Discussion today should be 
> relatively brief.  Ramesh has proposed improvements on the SC.  I'd like 
> to get approval of those.
> 
> 
>                      TinyOS Open Technology Alliance
> 
> Introduction
> 
> The TinyOS community has grown to include several thousand developers
> and users in dozens of countries, plus hundreds of companies,
> universities, and government institutions.  It has built a broad
> technology base for wireless embedded networks in an open, informal
> collaboration that was largely rooted at the University of California,
> Berkeley.  With the growing commericial and technological impact of
> the community and the de facto standards represented by the TinyOS
> distribution, we are creating a organizational structure for the
> advancement of the open embedded network ecosystem around TinyOS and
> support the activities, interactions, and development of the worldwide
> academic and industrial TinyOS community.
> 
> Mission
> 
> The mission of the TinyOS Alliance is to provide a forum to facilitate
> the continued growth of a healthy TinyOS developer and user community
> with support for innovation as well as industry advancement, the
> development and maintenance of a stable, technically-sound base of
> TinyOS technology and surrounding tools through the creation of
> standard interfaces and protocols, vetted extensions, open reference
> implementations, technical documents, testing and verification suites,
> and educational materials, the contribution of innovative technology
> from a world-wide research community, as well as the maturation and
> dissemination of these contributions, the promotion of the technology,
> the community, and the impact of networked embedded systems.
> 
> Participation
> 
> The Alliance continues the TinyOS tradition of promoting broad
> membership.  It seeks to keep barriers to entry low in all respects:
> legal, financial, and organizational.  As with IETF and Apache, it is
> a meritocracy that encourages, promotes, and credits the contributions
> of its members.  It provides an organizational structure that reinforces
> important, broadly adopted design choices to build consensus and establish
> key de facto standard interfaces.
> 
> The fundamental membership is individual, as individuals create work 
> products,
> serve on working groups and committees, and vote.  We have two forms:
> 
>   * Member: Individual who signs the Alliance membership form and 
> participates
>     at a basic level, typically as consumer of technology.
> 
>   * Contributing Member: Individual who joins working groups,
>     attends meetings, or contributes code or other assets to the
>     Alliance.   Contributing members are elected to various posts and
>     have voting rights.  Members may submit a request to be a contributing
>     member with a short description of contributions.
> 
> Corporations and organizational have institutional membership, which 
> reflects
> their degree of effort.
> 
>   * Institutional Member: Corporation or institutional organization
>     that signs the institutional membership form, agrees to appear on 
> the Alliance
>     web site and documents, and pays a nominal administrative fee.
> 
>   * Contributing Institutional Member: Corporation or institutional
>     organization that provide financial support, resources,
>     facilities, technical contributions, intellectual property,
>     marketing support, or other meaningful contributions to the
>     Alliance.
> 
> IP and Licensing
> 
> Intellectual property will be addressed in a manner similar to the
> IETF.  Meetings, discussions, presentations, and technical documents
> are non-confidential. Membership does not require or provide an
> explicit IP pool, as is found in Zigbee or W3C, nor conducting a
> comprehensive IP inventory.  Members have an on-going responsibility
> to disclose IP of relvance, whether it is their property or not, so
> that Alliance members can make informed decisions and trade-offs.
> Working groups seek to develop approaches, interfaces, and protocols
> that can reasonably be implemented without the use of proprietary
> technology, although companies may well develop their own proprietary
> versions.  Where members choose to donate IP, it will be treated along
> with other forms of contribution in establishing member status.
> 
> The source licensing policy seeks to promote "rough consensus AND
> running code".  In particular, it encourages the creation of quality
> reference implementations of standardized interfaces, while permitting
> proprietary development beyond the reference, and crediting the
> authors of code and other work products for their efforts.  The
> current TinyOS code base on SourceForge carries a small set of
> variants of the BSD license in which the Copyright is held by the
> author's institution.  The Alliance will authorize a small set of BSD
> templates for use in code that it distributes.  Alliance rules
> stipulate that use of the code or other work products for commercial
> products, research reports, or social good should give credit to the
> authors and tools will be provided to facilitate such creditation.
> 
> Organizational Structure
> 
> The core of the Alliance organization is the working groups.  Each has
> a chair, membership, and charter.  Overseeing the working groups is a
> Steering committee, composed of WG chairs and members elected at
> large.  The SC establishes WG policy, manages WG creation,
> termination, and arbitration, and supervise activities to resolve
> conflicting directions and move the process towards overall
> architectural harmony.  Working groups may be longstanding or
> short-term and may be chartered by the SC or formed from grass roots
> efforts.  As a non-profit, the Alliance also has a director, a board,
> and modest adminstrative support.  Almost all positions in the Alliance
> will be on a volunteer basis.
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