| Meeting
OHS Project , the unfinished revolution previous meeting, next meeting. 1 Agenda: 2
Armstrong, Eric - TreeLight
Minutes: 4 SRI Engineering Building, EK255.
1) Pat and Doug related news from their Washington trip. Pat relayed that Werner Schaer (President, Software Productivity Consortium) is in favour of OHS, but SPC will not finance OHS development. However in line with their mission to help member companies, SPC will hold workshops and meetings on using OHS when it is ready. Doug noted that Werner is disappointed that Curt Carlson (CEO, SRI) is not more proactive. Pat adds that while Curt remains convinced of the benefit and is a strong supporter of the big vision, there's not been any Institute action. SRI is not a cash rich place right now. Curt is also not completely convinced about open source. Doug, on the other hand, is convinced intuitively about the importance of open source, but he noted that it would be nice to have facts to back up his intuition. 4B 2) Tom Hill, who cofounded EOE with Jim Spohrer, was teleconferenced in, and introduced himself. We promised to e-mail him information about the unrev-ii mailing list, so he could participate in discussions. 4C 3) Doug talked with Marcello (before meeting) and came
up with four basic vectors to get off the ground:
Marcello reported that his division will be spinning out from SRI and will probably be in a better position as a smaller organization to support this program. He has spoken to division head Bill Gunn about this, who has expressed interest, but wants to make sure the logistics are sorted out. Discussion follows about this: fellows have to support themselves, bring something to the table, that it is sure what they want to do is build Improvement Infrastructure, there's alignment and it doesn't turn out to be high-tech tourism. 4D1 4) Doug spent a day in Washington at the Genova Project. GP is putting together tools and human systems aspect, providing support for high level decision makers, intelligence, military, policy issues. Doug talked with them about OHS and addressability. They might be able to funnel money to us without any overhead time. 4E 5) Pat notes that there are ways that can get funding from the government, model of sustainable project in SRI terms. For it, he needs a crisp statement of the big goal. A one paragraph statement of the first step in bullets and brief statements, eg. v.1 of OHS. Powerpoint slides are crucial for government funding. 4F Eugene has taken all three summaries that have been done thus far and suggests we work on them to produce the statement for Pat. 4F1 Marcello points out that in marketing, we need to target individuals, look for the hook. 4F2 6) John suggests a lead: Francis Heylighen who has a cooperative research agreement with Xerox. 4G Eugene observes that there are lots of potential collaborations but we're not at that stage yet. Let's email leads to the list so this info will be archived for when we get to that stage. 4G1 7) Doug will do an internal seminar for VA Linux. We're currently trying to schedule it in three weeks. On the week of the 15th, he will also present at a workshop organized by SPC that's funded by ARPA. 4H 8) Eugene proposes we move to working on Pat's needs. Because Pat had to leave the meeting early, Eugene proposed to table the first paragraph until next week, and talk about the second paragraph -- identifying the "first step." Everyone agreed that the key to both paragraphs is the audience that is being targeted, which in this case is the government, people who may not have even heard of Doug. 4I Doug suggested starting with software development documents, determining the multiple views we'd like to have, and transcoding/translating into that form. Eugene stated that central to doing this was coming up with an intermediate file format. 4I1 Eric asked for a description of Augment's data structures. Doug said that was easily doable, and promised to put a presentation together. 4I2 Marcello asked whether this first step could be demonstratable as early as possible. A demonstration would show the value of what we're doing, and would pique people's imaginations. Eugene added that the high-level use cases will outline what we want to demo. 4I3 9) Discussion of setting up demo of Augment and what's needed for it. This serves two purposes: It shows the team its capabilities, and can be used during presentations to others. Doug agreed to set up a demo for next week's meeting. Eugene and Joe volunteered to help Doug set it up, if he needs it. 4J 10) More general design discussions followed. Doug emphasized the importance of citing e-mail, and his desire to add addressability to the current hypermail archive. 4K 11) Summary of the "first step" discussion. Warren noted the advantage of having programmers as target community is that we can attract more programmers to the project. Queries, Directed Graph, Versioning, organizational bodies, audience in terms of bootstrapping. 4L Eugene noted that there are two "first steps." Our own internal "first step" and the "first step" for Pat's audience. We can work out this latter paragraph next week, when Pat is back. 4L1 Doug brought up a presentation he is doing for DARPA-funded workshop in two weeks. He's not completely familiar with the audience at that workshop, and solicited ideas for what to present to this group. 4L2 John asked about Collab.net as a possible source of collaboration. Eugene reminded the group that they had met with Brian Behlendorf of Collab.net a few weeks ago. There's a lot of synergy, but funding is not likely, because Collab.net is a startup. VA Linux/SourceForge is a better shorter term opportunity. However, in both cases, we need to reach a certain stage before any group takes us seriously. It's important for us to achieve that stage before we can expect groups in general to take us seriously. 4L3 Doug also brought up a presentation he's doing for Cadence at the end of the month. The company wants him to talk about this project. 4L4 We all agreed that having demos ready as soon as possible is a good internal first step. Augment should serve as an initial demo, but Marcello noted that we need to have more visually exciting demos. Augment is so fast, it can be hard to follow what's going on without full concentration. Talked about mocking up demos, and proposed various ways of doing this. 4L5 Warren proposes we have a show and tell, a presentation of what people in the team would like to do. 4L6 12) Joe said that he'd put together an initial glossary, but said that in order to do so, he wanted the group to contribute initial terms. Doug said to start with XML and XML-related terms. Eugene suggested "transcoding" and "translating." 4M Doug said that if he received a copy of the glossary
early enough, he would suck it into Augment, and show how Augment aided
the collaborative development of glossaries. 4M1
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