How TFX projects are organized
From TeamFrednetWiki
This document describes the overall organization of the Team FREDNET mission as of 2009-09-01.
Contents |
Introduction
Complex endeavors require the broad skill set of individuals to be successful. Our wiki pages allow these individuals to collaborate on technical programs that result in open source deliverables which the community at large can use for their own programs.
To organize the efforts of Team FREDNET, we have established portals that direct participants to any number of on going projects. The portals represent the elements of a matrix where hardware, software, management, and discipline expertise interface with the uniques elements of a mission (e.g. vehicles, buses, hover crafts, communications, etc.).
Portals
We employ portals as a tool to collect and present various areas of work. A portal may apply to the subject where news, members (contributors) and resources are elements of the effort.
Should we have mission portals and resource portals? Mission portals are elements of a mission. Resource portals are a) hardware, b) software, and c) wetware. Resource portals are matrix'ed into mission portals - yes?
See the List of Portals for various examples.
See the Guidelines for Portals article for more detail.
Working Groups
Working groups are generally consumers of our formal requirements and design process. In this perspective, working groups collect the people working on one or more design trade study efforts within logical groups of systems. For example Bus, Lander, Rover, Ground Support -- and within these major systems of course there are many interrelated subsystems. And of course the same people in the working groups are also contributing to their respective requirements.
Role of the individual
According to the demands of a distributed (decentralized) open source effort, the principal actor is the individual. Each individual performs the effort to act on work efforts including collaboration and development. Each formulates a perspective on how best to apply ones interests and skills to the team effort, and the perspective evolves daily, weekly and monthly according to the efforts of others to collaborate and to effect evolution.
Parallelism and Iteration
We tend to speak of these processes in terms of parallelism and iteration.
The idea of parallelism is perhaps best exemplified in the rovers, where multiple concurrent development efforts are underway. Among these efforts, research and development can produce techniques valuable to more than one group within the working group, or for other working groups. Collaboration among parallel efforts shares status and major achievements, progress and developments among the working group and the team as a whole.
The idea of iteration is perhaps best exemplified in the wiki, where many team members contribute to evolving a wiki article or portal. The effort of one person is developed in a useful step by one or more others, as in email or the forum as well, and this continues until a satisfactory result is achieved.
Collaboration
Through all of these processes, effective collaboration is achieved as individuals engage work and exert effort to improve our understanding of how we will achieve our goals.
Leadership and Management
Through these processes, and recognizing the challenge, we tend to see leadership in terms of effort, comprehension, collaboration and results. And we tend to see management in terms of project organizational activity that's very important but easier to perform.
It's important to us to recognize that the term management in our context is completely divorced from those associations to money or capital or "deal flow" that may be found in other areas of life. This idea is important to our success because we need to avoid the interpersonal competition that may be common to other areas of life.
Upon occasion we may need some hierarchy, but it tends to be dynamic to the moment according to mutual respect for individual study and contribution.
Leadership is recognized in this way, and our organization adapts to the leadership of its members in order to make the efforts of our leaders as easy as possible. sometimes leadership becomes formalized in some way, and sometimes not. The formal organizational structure has its purposes, but effort and results are most important, and we know this in recognizing the challenges we each have accepted as our own in our respective commitments.
Work Packages
Software deliverables (machine readable information products) should be maintained in a project repository with explicit licensing.
Software packaging depends on intended usage.
Ease of use may iterate.
For example, CAD/CAM software packaging may be a matter of providing multiple equivalent file formats.
Hardware deliverables should include full software and documentation for reproducing the device or system.
Tasks
Tasks are defined and managed in this wiki. The definition of tasks should be expected to iterate.
