[Tinyos-devel] TinyOS Alliance WG Feedback

[David E. Culler]

Dear TinyOS Community,
     The TinyOS Alliance Working group has been actively refining the 
structure of the proposed Alliance, which was outlined at the TTX3.
The following provides a brief overview. Additional detail will be 
available at the Working Group site.  We are now starting to solicit 
memberships.
Before formalizing this organizational structure, we seek feedback from 
the community on the approach.   Please do not hesitate to send your 
comments to tinyos-alliance at millennium.berkeley.edu.

Thank you,

   David Culler



                     TinyOS Open Technology Alliance

Introduction

The TinyOS community has grown to include several thousand developers
and users in dozens of countries, plus hundreds of companies,
universities, and government institutions.  It has built a broad
technology base for wireless embedded networks in an open, informal
collaboration that was largely rooted at the University of California,
Berkeley.  With the growing commericial and technological impact of
the community and the de facto standards represented by the TinyOS
technology, we are creating a organizational structure to support the
worldwide academic and industrial TinyOS community and advance the
open embedded network ecosystem around TinyOS.  This document provides a
brief overview of the Alliance; greater detail is provided in the Alliance
Workgroup TEP 120.

Mission

The mission of the TinyOS Alliance is to provide a forum to facilitate:
  * the continued growth of a healthy TinyOS developer and user community
    with support for innovation as well as industry advancement,
  * the development and maintenance of a stable, technically-sound base of
    TinyOS technology and surrounding tools through the creation of
    standard interfaces and protocols, vetted extensions, open reference
    implementations, technical documents, testing and verification suites,
    and educational materials,
  * the contribution of innovative technology from a world-wide research
    community and the maturation and dissemination of these
    contributions, and
  * the promotion of the technology, the community, and the impact of 
networked
    embedded systems.

Participation

The Alliance continues the TinyOS tradition of promoting broad
membership.  It seeks to keep barriers to entry low in all respects:
legal, financial, and organizational.  The Alliance is organized to
encourage, promote, and credit the contributions of its members.  It
provides an organizational structure that reinforces important,
broadly adopted design choices to build consensus and establish key de
facto standard interfaces.

The fundamental membership is individual, as individuals create work 
products,
serve on working groups and committees, and vote.  We have two forms:

  * Member: Individual who joins the Alliance and participates at a
     basic level, typically as consumer of technology.

  * Contributing Member: Individual who aditionally joins working groups,
    attends meetings, or contributes code or other assets to the
    Alliance.   Contributing members are elected to various posts and
    have voting rights.

There is no individual membership fee, but members will be responsible for
nominal registration fees at Alliance meetings.

Corporations and organizational have institutional membership, which 
reflects
their degree of effort.

  * Institutional Member: Corporation or institutional organization
    that joins the Alliance, agrees to appear on the Alliance
    web site and documents, and pays a nominal administrative fee.
    (Min. Annual $500 for small companies and non-profits, $1000 for larger)

  * Contributing Institutional Member: Corporation or institutional
    organization that additionally provides financial support, resources,
    facilities, technical contributions, intellectual property,
    marketing support, or other meaningful contributions to the
    Alliance. Such institutions are featured prominently in the Alliance and
    have the opportunity to appoint individuals as contributing members.
    (Min. Annual $2000 for small companies and non-profits, $5000 for 
larger)

IP and Licensing

Intellectual property will be addressed in a open manner.  Meetings,
discussions, presentations, and technical documents are
non-confidential. Membership does not require or provide an explicit
IP pool, nor does it require conducting a comprehensive IP inventory.
Members have an on-going responsibility to disclose IP of relvence,
whether it is their property or not, so that Alliance members can make
informed decisions and trade-offs.  Working groups seek to develop
approaches, interfaces, and protocols that can reasonably be
implemented without the use of proprietary technology, although
companies may well develop their own proprietary versions.  Where
members choose to donate IP, it will be treated along with other forms
of contribution in establishing member status.

The source licensing policy seeks to promote "rough consensus AND
running code".  In particular, it encourages the creation of quality
reference implementations of standardized interfaces, while permitting
proprietary development beyond the reference, and crediting the
authors of code and other work products for their efforts.  The
current TinyOS code base on SourceForge carries a small set of
variants of the BSD license in which the Copyright is held by the
author's institution.  The Alliance will authorize a small set of
templates for use in code that it distributes.  Alliance rules
stipulate that use of the code or other work products for commercial
products, research reports, or social good should give credit to the
authors and tools will be provided to facilitate such creditation.

Organizational Structure

The core of the Alliance organization is the working groups (WG).  Each has
a chair, membership, and charter.  Overseeing the working groups is a
Steering committee (SC), composed of WG chairs and members elected at
large.  The SC establishes WG policy, manages WG creation,
termination, and arbitration, and supervise activities to resolve
conflicting directions and move the process towards overall
architectural harmony.  It also recognizes individuals and institutions
as Contributing Members.  Working Groups may be longstanding or
short-term and may be chartered by the SC or formed from grass roots
efforts.  As a non-profit, the Alliance also has a director, a board,
and modest adminstrative support.  Almost all positions in the Alliance
will be on a volunteer basis.

Alliance Working Group

David Culler (Ch)   - UCB/ArchedRock culler at cs.berkeley.edu
Philippe Bonnet      - Diku        bonnet.p at gmail.com
Deborah Estrin       - UCLA        destrin at cs.ucla.edu
Ramesh Govindan   - USC               ramesh at usc.edu
Mike Horton           - Crossbow        mhorton at xbow.com
Jeonghoon Kang      - KETI        budge at keti.re.kr
Philip Levis              - Stanford       pal at cs.stanford.edu
Lama Nachman       - Intel        lama.nachman at intel.com
Jack Stankovic       - UVA        stankovic at cs.virginia.edu
Rob Szewczyk       - Moteiv        rob at moteiv.com
Matt Welsh            - Harvard        mdw at cs.harvard.edu
Adam Wolisz       - TU Berlin        awo at ieee.org