[Eg-oversight-board] Oversight Board meeting - Wednesday 10/17, 12:00-13:00 EDT

[Dan Scott]

On Wed, Oct 17, 2012 at 08:51:37AM -0400, Kathy Lussier wrote:
> Thanks Galen,
> 
> Can we add the Google Summer of Code Doc Sprint Camp to the agenda?
> There has been some interest among DIG members in the Evergreen
> project submitting an application to participate. For those who
> didn't see the e-mails on the DIG list, you can read about it at
> http://markmail.org/message/umvmjixn26f7ypa6.
> 
> Is this something that the Oversight Board needs to sign off on
> before DIG can apply?

I don't think that the Oversight Board needs to sign off on it - who
wants to stand in the way of potential progress on the docs? - but an
explicit statement of support from the Oversight Board might add
strength to the application.

I should note that the tools used to produce the documentation differ
from what we're using, but I don't think that's a bad thing. The focus
is on writing and keeping the tools out of the way. The other concern
that I initially had was that there might be a copyright or licensing
conflict with our own licensing approach, but I don't think that will be
an issue as authors retain their copyright. So while content written
during the sprint would go into flossmanuals.net under a GNU General
Public License, because the authors retain copyright, they would also be
able to contribute the same text that they wrote to our official docs
under our normal doc license. [1][2][3][4]

[1] I'm basing this on the following statement at
http://en.flossmanuals.net/index.php?plugin=blog -> About tab: "Anybody
can contribute to a manual. To get write access to the "write" area of
the site, all you need to do is to create a login ID on
booki.flossmanuals.net.  By creating a login ID, you agree to release
what you create here under  the GNU General Public License. Your login
and profile  information is used to attribute copyright to you for what
you write."

[2] I am not a lawyer / this does not constitute legal advice.

[3] A third party wouldn't be able to simply pull the content from
flossmanuals.net and drop it directly into our docs; they would need to
relicense it as CC-BY-SA-3.0 (our normal docs license, per
http://docs.evergreen-ils.org/2.3/licensing.html ) which requires the
permission of the authors. I suspect anyone attending the doc sprint
would be happy to also contribute their work to the official Evergreen
docs or state that they would also make their work available under the
CC-BY-SA-3.0 so that it can be incorporated.

[4] Did I mention that I'm not a lawyer?