Embedded Wiki Task Force Conference Call

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Agenda for the Embedded Wiki Task Force Conference call on October 5th.

Minutes are incorporated directly into the Agenda as applicable below as emphasized text.

Invitees:

  • Sampo Nurmentaus - attended.
  • Bill Traynor - attended.
  • Paul Mundt - attended.
  • Scott Preece - attended.
  • Tim Bird - attended.

Discussion Items:

  • selection of wiki engine
    • Media Wiki is preferred - can Movial admin it?
      • Everyone agreed the Media Wiki was the most logical choice at this time for our wiki implementation
      • Sampo will check with Movial admins next week to determine if the MySQL Media Wiki dependence will be a problem
      • Some points raised to consider during the initial rollout are:
        • Back Ups - Sampo will find out if Movials backup scripts can accommodate MySQL
        • Load & Latency - consideration will need to be given to latency, given the diverse geographic locations of our target audience (JP, US, AU, etc.)
  • short-term host setup
    • We will use a Movial domain to get started.
  • domain name
    • Tim will approach Tim Riker regarding use of eLinux.org domain
  • policy guide
    • license for content
      • Everyone agreed that the GFDL makes the most sense at this point
      • Bill will put up a draft version of a Policy Guide for approval
    • what to host here vs. at Wikipedia
      • Wikipedia has a lot of good articles (we should not duplicate or fragment)
        • We agreed that we should not only not duplicate Wikipedia "encyclopedic" information, but that we should add to it as well
      • we have content that doesn't belong anywhere else:
        • conference presentations, technical papers, test results, tutorials, how-tos
          • The latter makes sense. Generally, any infomation that is not of a purely informational quality needs to remain on our site. In fact, Wikipedia prohibits this type of information.
          • Paul pointed out that a Siteseer-like indexing function would be beneficial for cross referencing technical papers
    • allowing anonymous contributions (should discourage, but should we disallow?)
      • Anonymous posting should be discouraged, however, to encourage posting in the ramp up of the site, we'll allow it providing that Mediawiki provides functionality for workflow of anonymous content posts. Should this become unwieldy or the anonymous posts be predominantly useless, it will be discontinued.
    • audience (= embedded systems developer)
    • timely content (do we want news, upcoming events, announcements, that have ongoing maintenance associated with them)
      • (Tim: I don't want to compete with Linux Devices or lwn.net)
        • We all agreed that timely content is imperative and possible RSS aggregation of other sites content could prove useful, we want to maintain the sites content goals of strict embedded linux technical information only
        • Bill proposed topic driven content on a periodic basis, in a similar manner to the way LWN does it's Kernel Hackers Bookshelf series. That is, in a given period (ex. monthly) the site's Front Page content focuses on a particular area of interest to Embedded Linux, such as Boot Up, Power Management, Filesystems, Toolchains etc. This may reflect the actual organization of the site itself and provide for a large influx of content to specific areas of interest in a given period.
        *It was agreed that we should maintain an Embedded Linux list of Events and contribute back to the LWN Events calendar as well.
  • site organization
    • major categories (or portals)
      • software, kernel, hardware, processors, boards, patches
      • companies, products, vendors, people, tools
      • technology areas
  • I'd like an organized index of material (not just search, but not necessarily top-down like Yahoo)
        *Time ran out before we really discussed site organization or site design.  Before we can make any many decisions in this regard, we need to investigate Media Wiki a little further to see if their are any organizational constraints and/or design constraints.