[Tinyos-alliance] TInyOS Documentation Working Group charter

[Matt Welsh]

David,

My suggestion is that the Documentation WG is responsible for the tools
and infrastructure needed to write and maintain documentation for TinyOS
- and the website is an important part of that. At the very least the
Doc WG will run a website for docs (perhaps 'docs.tinyos.net'). Perhaps
there should be a separate Website WG but as nobody has come forth to
propose that, for the time being I'm including it in the Doc WG - it can
be split off later if need be. I am concerned that if nobody takes
ownership of it it will languish.

Matt



On Fri, 2007-09-07 at 07:14 -0700, David E. Culler wrote:
> 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
> >
>