Documentation Standards

Introduction

As the project moves towards viral replication, it is important to create effective documentation standards. The scope of Open Source Ecology involves machine and organization level items leading to the Open Source Economy. In Phase I (January, 2013), we are defining the standards for the 50 GVCS machines, which is intended to be a beta test for a larger platform that scales to any number of items - encyclopedic scope. Organizational aspects for creating the open source economy will be developed in Phase II (February, 2013).

Design Rationale

The scope of effective documentation standards for OSE includes Machine, Organizational, and Wiki level areas of documentation.

Organizatinal Level

• The organizational level involves documentation related to running a GVCS-based development, production, or other applied project.
• Enterprise development documentation.

Machine Level

• Understanding the standards makes it possible to navigate both graphically and via the address bar on the OSE wiki - to access any piece of documentation for any machine.
• Machine naming is standard. Currently, the names used on the main site at opensourceecology.org are used.
• Each machine has a Core and Supporting documentation set. The Core set includes those pieces of documentation that are indispensible for the safe and effective building and usage of GVCS tools by inexperienced builders/users. Supporting documentation is that which allows for the modification, remixing of modules, and other hacks on the machines. It also includes that information which makes replication easier, but which is not critical to such replication - by a novice builder.
• Each Machine has a finite, well-defined set of Core Documentation and Supporting Documentation.
• Supporting Documentation consists of Wiki-level (such as Links section or Index) and Machine-level items (such as CAE analysis - noncritical but desirable for replication)
• Standards are consistent with Open Source Hardware Association Open Source Hardware Definition.

Wiki Level

• Each machine has a particular set of wiki-level Supporting Documenation items - such as Links (example below). Standards are defined for each of these Supporting Documentation item

Links

• Documentation Standards Development
• See Documentation Standards Old
• GVCS Interface Design Standards
• Extreme Modularity Resource Map
• Open Source Hardware Modularity Pattern Language
• OS Hardware for Humanitarian Aid - [1]
• [Adafruit's Layers of Licensing]
• [OSHWA's FAQ]
• [OSHWA's Sharing Best Practices]