[Cu-wireless] me and wireless

[Chase Phillips]

On Fri, 26 Jul 2002, Zachary C. Miller wrote:

> just sending out a note about what is going on with me and wireless.

[ big snip ]

> As far as what our website should look like, I don't care abotu style,
> I care about content. If people want to make it look whizzy or look
> minimalist I don't care. The goal is to get useful content in
> there. That includes lots of cool tools that we will use for doing our
> wireless mission. Links to useful compiled information. A wiki for
> people to collaborate. Links to documentation of projects. Mapping
> tools. Databases of nodes. Etc.  Right now our content is no vacuous
> that it really isn't going to make a difference whether the site is
> whizzy or minimalist, it still won't have content.

I definitely agree that content is "king".  When I mentioned that Mark and
I are trying to come up with a site layout, I am referring to our work to
best organize the already-existent content of the site and identify
sections and pages which, although they do not yet exist, should.
Although we'll eventually spend time deriving a graphical design, style is
mostly window dressing to make it aesthetically pleasing.

We recognize that the amount of information and cumulative knowledge of
this groups' members makes a contentful website a necessity - not just for
us internally, but for wireless groups everywhere.  This is most certainly
true in light of the fact that there is not much information out there on,
eg., ad-hoc routing protocols over 802.11 (sore point for Stephane and
Dave ;), or for an explanation of the Ammo Can Router (which just _sounds_
so cool, among other things).

Additionally, I'm of the mind that rolling the site out in portions is an
ultra-practical solution.  Since content is so king, I'd rather spend time
getting pages up than trying to set up a wiki for people to add/edit a
nascent site.  Ahh, but this is the open source mentality, where 85% of
the work for version one has to be done before the project can be
successfully opened up to the general developer community.  IMO, should we
determine that a wiki is necessary at some point in the future, we can add
it then.

Comments?

regards,
Chase Phillips
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