[Tinyos-alliance] TInyOS Documentation Working Group charter

[David E. Culler]

I like that plan.  Build up what the group feels is best for docs and 
then integrate.

Matt Welsh wrote:
> 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
>>>>         
>
>