Technical Committee File Naming Conventions

Note: I wrote this in January 1996. Since then, the implementation of the ASI web management system has far surpassed the concepts for file management presented here. We'll keep this on line, however, because it shows the oogenesis of the WebSite Director system, and still has some useful guidelines for technical committees.

The technical committee membership lists should be broken up into separate files, with data for each committee in its own directory.

Here's what we think the users and maintainers would want to see . . .

1. Files that appear in every directory throughout the Artemis Data Book

          File Name                  Content
          index.html                 o  Index of files
                                     o  Automatically created by Dana's
                                        indexing engine
          "dir-name".txt             o  An empty file with the name of this
                                        directory, used as a navigation file
                                        for maintaining the domain
          active-files.txt           o  List of active html files in this
                                        directory.  This is used by the index
                                        builder and html builder routines.  It
                                        also can be used by mirroring engines
                                        that duplicate the ASI domain files
                                        on other sites around the world.)
           "other stuff"             o  Text files with information about who
                                        maintains each file, who maintains
                                        this directory, and whatever else the
                                        ECTC needs to write those cool scripts
   

2. Files unique to a specific type of directory

   Directory /adb/06/07/ Technical Committees

          File Name                  Content
   
          tech-committees.html       o  List of committees
                                     o  OSF organizational structure
                                     o  Links to individual committees
          osf-whatever.html          o  Office of Space Flight stuff
          charter.html               o  OSF Charter
          tech-council.html          o  Description of the Technical Council
   

   And an example of what committee would have in its own directory:

   Directory /adb/06/07/03/01/ Mission Design Technical Committee

          File Name                  Content
   
          charter.html               o  Charter for this technical committee
          summary.html               o  Summary of what this committee is about
          operating-plan.html        o  Tasks
                                     o  Products (includes ADB sections)
                                     o  Schedules
                                     o  Work Breakdown Structure
                                     o  Customers and suppliers for products
          specs.html                 o  Applicable Requirements
                                     o  Applicable Specifications
                                     o  Documentation tree
          join.html                  o  Sign-up form for committee membership
          comm.html                  o  Description of listservers, news groups,
                                        other communications forums for this
                                        technical committee
                                     o  Sign-up form form for listservers
          processes.html            o  Processes and flow charts for how
                                        this committee does what it does
   

Note that it's all right for files to have the same name as long as they're in different directories. If we standardize the file names in each committee's directory, it will be easier to maintain the web site and see how we're doing vs. The Plan. Of course, each technical committee will have its own additional information to store on-line.

We might have to keep reminding everyone that the directories in the Artemis Society part of the data book are for administrative information like lists of committee members and task plans. Technical information and spaceship designs -- that is, the products of the committee -- have a home elsewhere in the data book.

Once the ECTC gets the html-builder going -- the program that assembles the *.html files from all the available information -- we'd only be writing and maintaining files named members.body, charter.body, etc. The html-builder program will add a masthead and footer information when it builds the *.html file.

If we need to, we can add yet another subdirectory named "00" (zero zero) under any directory in the Artemis Data Book, to organize massive numbers of files. It's not likely that we'd need to do this, but if it comes up, it could be done without fouling up the rest of the outline and structure.

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