9. Funding
====================================================================
-As with the IETF, individuals are responsible for their own costs,
-which primarily involve meetings, travel, and generation of work
-products. Membership participation will involve attendance at
-Alliance meetings. Registration fees will be charged to cover costs
-associated with adminstration of the meetings.
-
-Companies and institutions are encouraged to contribute financial and
-in-kind support. It will be essential that companies provide initial
-funding to create the legal structure and to establish basic IT
-capabilities to host the web site and working groups.
-
Initially, we expect that there are no full time employees in the
Alliance and that funding needs are limited to such items as lawyer's
fees, web site costs, and insurance. If the Alliance eventually
requires full time support personnel, the funding structure will have
to be re-visited.
+As with the IETF, individuals are responsible for their own costs,
+which primarily involve meetings, travel, and generation of work
+products. The Alliance is predominantly a volunteer organization.
+Membership participation will involve attendance at
+Alliance meetings. Registration fees will be charged to cover costs
+associated with adminstration of the meetings.
+
To maintain the focus on technical excellence and meritocracy, we want
to avoid the heavy-handed quid-pro-quo seen in many industrial
consortiums where funding determines influence. The best use of funds
and the best form of influence is direct contribution to the work
-products of the Alliance. We will permit targeted contributions
-toward specific working groups or technical capabilities.
-
-We seek to keep overall structure lean, mostly volunteer.
-Focus on desired impact and recognition, rather than control.
+products of the Alliance.
+To keep the structure of the Alliance and its operations minimalist
+and lean, membership focuses on desired impact and recognition, rather
+than control. We want the best way to influence the direction of the Alliance
+to be to contribute technical work and demonstrate leadership, rather than
+try to control what individuals can or cannot contribute.
+Companies and institutions are encouraged to contribute financial and
+in-kind support. It will be essential that companies provide initial
+funding to create the legal structure and to establish basic IT
+capabilities to host the web site and working groups.
Institutional members
will pay an annual membership fee. In some cases, a
contributing corporate member may provide in-kind services
become a contributing corporate member, e.g., in those cases
where such a membership may be prohibited or unwanted.
The costs of meetings, such as the TinyOS
-technology exchange, will be covered through registration fees.
-
-Individuals are responsible
-for their own costs such as
-for travel, meeting costs, or costs for contributing
-software or documentation to the Alliance. The Alliance
-is primarily a volunteer organization.
+technology exchange, will be covered through registration fees and
+not by institutional membership fees.
10. Work Products
====================================================================
-Code base
-Stable, robust core release
-Rapidly evolving, innovative extensions
-Reference Implementations
-Tools
-Data
-Documentation
-Standard proposals
-Marketing and Promotion
-Testing and Compliance
-Assessments
-Applications and uses of technology
-Educational Materials
+The broad mission of the Alliance calls for a broad range of
+work products.
+
+Foremost among these are a set of TEPs documenting
+systems and protocols as well as TEPs that provide guidance
+and knowledge to the community. Technical documentation will have
+robust and open reference implementations for the community to
+use, refine, improve, and discuss. These reference implementations
+will not preclude alternative, compatibile implementations which may
+have additional features or optimizations. The Alliance Working Groups
+will periodically produce periodic releases of these reference
+implementations for the community to use and improve.
+
+The Alliance will support community contributions
+of innovative extensions and systems by providing a CVS repository
+to store them.
+In order to keep these contributions organized for users, the
+Steering Committee may nominate one or more people to caretake
+the repository by setting minimal guidelines for the use of
+the directory structure and migrating code as it joins the core
+or falls into disuse.
+
+To make these technological resources more accessible and useful
+to a broad embedded networks community, the Alliance will be
+dedicated to providing a set of educational materials. This
+includes introductory tutorials, documentation of core systems,
+simple and complex example applications, and user guides.
+
+In addition to educational sample applications, whose purpose
+is to teach new developers about the internals and workings of
+the technology, the Alliance will develop and make available
+several end-user applications and tools. The goal is to improve
+the accessibility of the technology to end-users while
+demonstrating its effectiveness. Historical examples of such applications
+include Surge and TinyDB. An important part of this effort is
+good documentation for users who are not expert programmers, as well
+as tools and graphical environments.
+
11. Conclusions
====================================================================
-The time has come to create an organizational structure to allow the effort to grow
-Beyond the Berkeley + Others
-It is a balancing act
-Stability vs Innovation
-Broad Participation vs Strong Requirements
-Uniform Licensing vs Institutional Differences
-Goal is to help to community to work together
-Not a forum for maneuvering and intrigue
-Focus on consensus building and technical soundness
-Minimal mechanism to resolve rare differences
-Focus on working groups and individual contributions
-with architectural and organization oversight
-Be pragmatic on participation
-Don\92t have to make deep commitments to participate
-Can\92t expect broad guarantees in return
+By focusing on consensus building and technical excellence, the
+Alliance seeks to avoid being a forum for political and economic
+positioning. It will achieve this by focusing on working groups
+and the contributions of individuals, while not taking strong
+positions on the benefits or drawbacks of different approaches.
+The variety of application domains sensornets are used in and
+the huge differences in requirements mean that having a suite
+of solutions, rather than a single one, is often not only
+desirable but essential.
+
+Over the past five years, low-power embedded sensor networks have
+grown from research prototypes to working systems that are being
+actively deployed. Furthermore, there is a vibrant research community
+that actively works to deploy these systems and collaborate with
+industry, making advances quickly accessible and usable. A great
+catalyst to this growth has been the presence of a large community
+around a shared, free code base.
+
+The time has come to create an organizational structure to
+allow the effort to grow further. As sensornets become more widespread,
+contributions and advancements will be from an increasingly broad
+demographic of users, and bringing them all together will speed
+progress and improve the potential benefit these systems can bring
+to society. This focus on bringing disparate groups together lies
+at the heart of the Alliance. Rather than depend on strong requirements,
+it depends on broad collaboration and participation, placing a minimalist
+set of expectations that will encourage the exchange of ideas and
+technology.
+
12. Author's Address
====================================================================
| Philippe Bonnet <bonnet.p@gmail.com>
| David Culler <culler@cs.berkeley.edu>
+| David Culler <dculler at archrock.com>,
| Deborah Estrin <destrin@cs.ucla.edu>
| Ramesh Govindan <ramesh@usc.edu>
| Mike Horton <mhorton@xbow.com>
| Matt Welsh <mdw@cs.harvard.edu>
| Adam Wolisz <awo@ieee.org>
-| David Culler <dculler at archrock.com>,
-
projects / tinyos-2.x.git / blobdiff