Style Guide

The short answer is anyone writing or updating confluence pages. Everyone involved with RHIT SmallSat should be engaged with maintaining documentation to make sure that work is not lost. That said, subsystem leaders have a special role in making sure their subsystem’s files are up to date.

Well it may seem a bit extreme to have a dedicated style guide for the research project we want to provide consistency and high quality information across all of our pages. It is essential that information is easily accessible and newcomers have a smooth on-boarding experience.

In general confluence should be used for any information that needs to be stored like a test procedure or instructions on installing software. SharePoint should only be use for file storage like PDFs of manuals, pictures and videos of components, and data dumps. Note that anything on SharePoint can be easily embedded on confluence by hitting the plus icon and typing in “Team Files” and then selecting the file or folder you want to embed.

Writing meeting notes/minutes is fairly simple. When using the template to create the meeting minute pages much of the required fields are already created. Taking notes in the meeting consists of filling in the blanks in the template. Of special note are the Meeting Takeaways, Action Items, and Decisions.

The meeting takeaways are the high level concepts that anyone trying to quickly understand what happened in the meeting should read. These should be completed after the meeting by the person taking the meeting notes that meeting. Action Items are the tasks that were assigned during the meeting, and Decisions are a list of the important list of decisions made during the meeting. Action Items and Decisions are collected from all sub meetings and displayed under the meeting page for that type of meeting (I.E Weekly Meetings) and also under the full Meetings page. After completing a task from action items check it off one one of these pages so that we know it is done.

The subsystem documentation serves as a single source of truth for what the current subsystem looks like. This means that it is essential that the major and minor design elements of the subsystem are documented in Confluence. Component-level design and considerations (see StarShade subsystem page) should be included as well. Subsystem documentation should include known issues and workarounds along with any operating notes for components. The format is decided on a per-subsystem basis.

The top level page of a subsystem serves as the overview of what is currently happening with the subsystem. Things like the subsystem Trello page, teams folder, and important links should go on there. The Mechanical Systems Subteam page acts as a template that includes a high-level overview of the system and its subsystems. This is where the current state of the system is, as well as the timeline, objectives, and high-level research.

This is the second most important page of the subsystem documentation. The research articles can be placed in the subsystem folder on the onedrive/sharepoint and embedded into the research page on Confluence and a short description attached. To embed a file click on the + to insert and then type Team Files and select the file. After publishing it should embed nicely into the page. Try to keep the description of the article short and sweet and make sure to either recommend reading or skipping the article.