[Tinyos-alliance] TInyOS Documentation Working Group charter

[Philip Levis]

On Sep 6, 2007, at 10:22 AM, David E. Culler wrote:

> Matt,
>    This looks like a great plan.  I'll take it to the Alliance  
> group.  I'd also like to volunteer to be in the group, but not  
> chair it.  I believe that once this is in motion there will  
> actually be a lot of interest.  One of the aspects we like to have  
> established early is the membership criteria.  This is a great  
> example.  Is it that you have docs to bring to the party?  Interest  
> in content management?
>    What you are really proposing here is much more than a  
> documentation group, but  a "publication group".  Coupling the two  
> can work well.  It is a lot of work to generate documentation, but  
> it is nice to get to shape the public face of the organization.  If  
> instead you have in mind the narrower charter, than we probably  
> need to partition the "redisgned web site" so that this group has  
> control of a portion of it and other groups control other  
> portions.  What I'd prefer to avoid is a tug of war between folks  
> on the "look and feel".  What gets placed in the center, what gets  
> place in the side, etc.

I think we can avoid a tug-of-war if we just have clear ownership --  
taking responsibility gives you control. I think putting doc in  
charge of the core TinyOS site would make sense, but as the charter  
points out, there are also things like wikis and WG pages that the  
core site links to. CSS is one easy way to make HTML content  
reasonably consistent but not constrained. The idea is that the doc  
WG is much more about making it easier for people to contribute  
documentation and integrate it into tinyos.net than controlling  
exactly how it's formatted. For example, if you look at the HOWTO's,  
there are a couple of common approaches writers take, but there isn't  
an iron fist telling you how to do them.

Phil