Guidelines for participation

From TeamFrednetWiki

The Guidelines for participation is the basic 'field operations manual' for all team members.

Contents 1 Formalities 1.1 Branding 2 Organizational philosophy 2.1 Leadership 2.2 Parallelism 2.3 Decentralization 2.4 Boldness 3 Organizational structure 3.1 Overview 3.2 Management 3.3 Volunteers 3.4 Ownership 4 Objectives 4.1 Landing a telerobotic rover on the Moon 4.2 Winning the Google Lunar X PRIZE 4.3 Planting the seeds for an Open Space community 4.4 Producing an end-product of high quality 4.5 Working effectively 4.6 Establishing financial support 4.7 Increasing membership 4.8 Spreading the word 5 Procedures 5.1 Follow our guidelines 5.2 Familiarize yourself with the mission 5.3 Communicate with the team 5.3.1 IRC Channel 5.4 Track updates of relevance to you 5.5 Document your work 5.6 Use standard units 5.7 Greet new members

Formalities

Branding

We are called Team FREDNET (case sensitive). Not "FREDNET", "FredNet", "team Frednet" or any of the other creative permutations that unfortunately are floating around on the web. Team FREDNET only, okay?

We use the term group for a team working inside Team FREDNET. Many Team FREDNET members have laws when they work with other countries. Please see our privacy policy.

Also note that Team FREDNET is a registered service mark, which is necessary to have a legal weapon against criminals setting up fake websites and other such unfortunate scams from the real world.

Organizational philosophy

Leadership

Team FREDNET is first and foremost an engineering effort. We use untraditional organizational methods by corporate standards (and certainly by space industry standards), but the end goal is very conventional: winning the grand prize.

To this end, Team FREDNET is directed by a clearly defined leadership, which is necessary to work with the outside world of e.g. partners and sponsors, and to lead work effectively at times when consensus and progress by other methods fails. The leadership holds final legal, fiscal and public responsibility, and as such must chart the organization and mission as they see fit to fulfill these responsibilities.

Parallelism

Parallelism is a key principle in Team FREDNET's open source organization. Technically this means that anybody is invited to propose and demonstrate a solution to a given problem. While we have to follow an official design baseline in order to build our systems, until a given design is fixed, anybody can submit their ideas for a solution. See Moon amateurs invite rover designs from the public for how it works. Please, note that this example is expired but concept reminds valid.

Decentralization

Team FREDNET does not own an expensive office building somewhere, with vast fields of cubicles, and 9-to-5 working hours. Our members work out of their own homes all over the world and organize themselves in the way most conductive to our mission, using the tools they find most appropriate (provided that the produced artifacts are readable without requiring expensive tools).

Eventually, we will have centralized physical facilities for specific purposes, such as hardware integration, testing, mission control, etc.

Boldness

The principle of 'boldness', not being shy to contribute to work begun by others, is the principle that made such projects as Wikipedia what they are today:

The Wikipedia community encourages users to be bold when updating pages. Wikis like ours develop faster when everybody helps to fix problems, correct grammar, add facts, make sure the wording is accurate, etc. We expect everyone to be bold and help make Wikipedia a better encyclopedia. How many times have you read something and thought, "Why aren't these pages copy-edited?" Wikipedia not only allows you to add, revise, and edit the article—it wants you to do it. It does require some amount of politeness, but it works. You'll see. Also, of course, others here will edit what you write. Do not take it personally! They, like all of us, just want to make Wikipedia as good an encyclopedia as it can possibly be. Also, when you see a conflict in a talk page, do not be just a "mute spectator". Be bold and drop your opinion there.[1]

We too encourage our members to boldly contribute to Team FREDNET's mission wherever they feel they can. Apart from being a great way to 'get things done', boldness can also catalyze otherwise deadlocked development processes and work as part of a valuable defense against organizational traps such as groupthink.

If you have an idea for a new design, create a group and start working. If you see the need for a new policy, formulate a guideline and let the team consider it. If you have a question to ask or insight to share, make a post in the forums. Rather give the team a chance to evaluate your ideas than not contribute at all.

The defined boundary to boldness is our team guidelines and, of course, national and international law. The undefined boundary is a measure of common sense and etiquette.

Organizational structure

Overview

We are organizing Team FREDNET into Working Groups supported by organizational matrices. The organization includes three primary matrices, namely Software, Hardware, and the Systems. Ultimately, most things will become systems but initially we are designating working groups as being driven primarily by either hardware or software requirements.

Each working group and matrix has a leader who is responsible for the work of that unit. In addition, each of these units may have a number of members. Being a member of a unit does not have any formal significance beyond indicating a special interest in the work of that unit, but members will generally be active contributors to the work of the unit as well.

Management

The set of leaders of Team FREDNET's formal working groups together constitute the management of the team. The management holds ultimate responsibility and decision-making power over the team's mission and all of its assets and resources (webservers, brands, contributed and invested money etc.)

Volunteers

However, since Team FREDNET's mission is an open source project, we also rely on volunteer contributors. Because the volunteers are not employed by Team FREDNET or under any kind of contract, the management does not give out 'commands' or 'orders' to these contributors. Instead, the leadership coordinate cooperation between management and volunteers by defining a number of requirements.

As volunteers contribute work meeting the requirements set forth by the management, the management continually evaluates how and if to integrate these contributions in the mission architecture, similarly to how leaders of an open source software project such as Linux or Firefox might evaluate how to integrate submitted patches.

Ownership

Team FREDNET and the Team FREDNET service mark legally belongs to Fred J. Bourgeois.

Objectives

Landing a telerobotic rover on the Moon

...

Winning the Google Lunar X PRIZE

...

Planting the seeds for an Open Space community

...

Producing an end-product of high quality

...

Working effectively

...

Establishing financial support

...

Increasing membership

...

Spreading the word

...

Procedures

Follow our guidelines

We have a set of guidelines ...

Familiarize yourself with the mission

If you just joined the team, it can be a good idea to read up on existing plans and requirements for the mission:

• Mission Profile
• Mission Requirements Document (Marked as confidential)
• Mission Plan
• System Overview

Communicate with the team

Use the forums...

IRC Channel

We also have an official IRC chat channel at:

• Server: irc.freenode.net
• Channel: #teamfrednet

To connect to our channel, you can use an IRC client such as mIRC, XChat or Pidgin.

Alternatively, you can connect directly from the web through this page (remember to choose a nickname not beginning with 'mib' or you will be disconnected).

Track updates of relevance to you

Use the 'Watchlist', 'Compare selected versions' and 'Recent changes' features of the wiki software to track changes to documents of relevance to you and your work...

Document your work

Unlike most other open source projects, much of our most valuable work can not be conducted online. Therefore it is important that this work (and online work as well) is explicitly documented so the rest of the team can see what has been done and draw advantage from it.

Use standard units

To avoid unit mixups, Team FREDNET use the International System of Units (SI) for all quantities and measurements that has a direct impact on the mission. Please use the SI system at all times. Also, always indicate which unit a given value is presented in.

For date and time, our standard format is the ISO 8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM).

Greet new members

If you have a spare moment, and someone recently joined the team, say hello to them and offer any assistance you may be able to provide to help them get up to speed. Team FREDNET's mission and organization increase in complexity all the time, and not all aspects of the project are readily documented in a way that allows newcomers to easily learn about them. If you are able to help a new member "get started" - find the people and information he or she needs, or point him or her to tasks that may be of interest to him, etc. - there is a much better chance of sustaining their interest in the mission, to the benefit of both parties.