[Tinyos-alliance] TInyOS Documentation Working Group charter

[Matt Welsh]

The other important point was that with Linux there was never any  
"official" documentation. The LDP was intended as and seen as a  
separate entity from whomever was developing Linux (fortunately  
everything was decentralized anyway). So no issues of ownership or  
branding.


On Sep 6, 2007, at 3:20 PM, Philip Levis wrote:

> 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