for already quite some time the idea of having task forces is floating around
in our community: small teams of RIOT developers that work together for some
time towards a (more or less) well-defined goal. A good and very successful
example for such a task force that concluded its task with great success was
the Network Stack Task Force (NSTF) which delivered the awesome gnrc stack
that we're now happily using to connect IoT devices to each other and to the
Internet.
The idea is to have an overview of currently active task forces and their
members. This might be helpful to get an easy overview over the latest activities
and important milestones on the RIOT roadmap and to get involved in those
activities.
+1 here too.
I think it is also important to describe to malloc and free
I mean how to:
1 - create a new task force (hopefully we have a lot more to come!)
2 - join/ping/revive an existing task force (e.g. OTA is somewhat dormant)
3 - dissolve an existing task force
For creating: how about, simply stating something like:
“If you wish to launch a new task force, go ahead, create your wikipage, and report your progress or summarize the latest stand of your discussions on devel@riot-os.org”
There’s the slight possibility that duplicate work may happen down the line, if a lot of task forces are active at the same time.
But this is not dangerous right now. If we want to cover this case, maybe we can add: “RIOT maintainers will contact you if duplicate or very closely-related work has been detected elsewhere, and if joining forces might make sense.”
For ping/join/revive how about naming one or two shepherds per task force, that could be pinged?
For dissolving: how about “either (i) the shepherd(s) declares the TF is done, or gives up, or (ii) the shepherds are unreachable, the TF has been dormant for a long time and RIOT maintainers declare the TF dissolved”
I mean how to: