(Unofficial/working title, of course!)

I plan to collect existing documentation into one unified text… this should include some relevant steps towards "knowledge transfer" for PlanetMath.

Outline

Website documentation

(This list is based on the list of existing site docs)

• Internationalization
• PlanetMath/Noosphere Scoring
• PlanetMath Content and Style Guide
• PlanetMath Automatic Reference Linking
• Controlling Linking
• Noosphere's Authority Model
• The PlanetMath FAQ
• New User Guide
• Graphics and PlanetMath
• Forum Policy
• TeX Mathematical Formula Quick Reference
• Content Committee Charter
• PlanetMath Community Guidelines
• PM Rules of Compliance and Enforcement

Nonprofit documentation/transparency)

(This is based on a list created by Ray; see below. There may be things to add to this list from Joe's "transparency-enhancing" project from earlier in 2009, see for example http://aux.planetmath.org/doc/sponsor.html.)

• A half-page executive summary
• Table of contents
• Goals and mission
• Contact information
• Governance and authority
• Policies and procedures
• Organizational roles and responsibilities
• Current personnel (board, administrators, staff, etc.)
• Membership
• Member statistics
• Foundational documents (articles of incorporation, bylaws, CC charter, etc.)
• Current finances and budget
• Annual report, 990, and the like
• Agendas and minutes of meetings

Noosphere documentation

• In addition to the Noosphere Google Code website (which is the site of active development)
• there is also Aaron's thesis
• And a few other pages around the wiki, starting with the Noösphere page.

Initial Project Description (by Ray)

One thing I have been thinking of for a while is a document of about 20-30 pages which would describe how the PM organization operates. Such a document wold put information which is currently scattered in various places, including in our brains, not all of it up to date, in a centralized, current, coherent form. Publishing such a document would do much to increase organizational transparency and should be valuable for raising funds because it would make it easy for prospective donors to gain an understanding of where their money would be going (or, more to the point, how it would get there).

As for the form such a document might assume, I am thinking of a suite of webpages which could be linked prominently from the home page, say via a link in the "information" part of the menu bar or from within the blurb at the top or wherever else might be appropriate once the home page is redesigned. Since preparing such a document would primarily be a matter of reassembling bits and pieces from already written texts and editing, it shouldn't take that long, so a month of part-time work should suffice. Also, I would be willing to help with this project as my schedule permits.

Here are some items (not meant as an exhaustive list) which I think such a document should have:

• A half-page executive summary
• Table of contents
• Goals and mission
• Contact information
• Governance and authority
• Policies and procedures
• Organizational roles and responsibilities
• Current personnel (board, administrators, staff, etc.)
• Membership
• Member statistics
• Foundational documents (articles of incorporation, bylaws, CC charter, etc.)
• Current finances and budget
• Annual report, 990, and the like
• Agendas and minutes of meetings

To be clear, I am not saying that the document needs to be organized in this way, but I would expect all this information to be in there and organized so as to make it easy to find a particular item, say, to find out who is currently a director or who hires programmers.

Thinking about this, I am remembering back to the discussions we were having a few years back about roles in the organization, Joe brought up the importance of knowledge management. This project fits exactly into that notion and I think it would be a good place to start implementing some of those ideas.