[Tinyos-alliance] TInyOS Documentation Working Group charter

[David E. Culler]

Shifting this discussion to the Alliance subset ...

My sense from the TTX discussion was that we had two distinct groups 
that we were going to form.  One responsible for a complete overhaul of 
the web site and one responsible for documentation.  They are both big 
tasks, but quite different.  The first involves all of the content 
management, out reach, working group visibility and coordination, news, 
etc.  Documentation is a big part of the content, but far from all of it. 


Matt Welsh wrote:
> 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
>