Re: [ba-ohs-talk] What are we trying to accomplish?
Eric Armstrong wrote: (01)
> James Michael DuPont wrote:
>
>
>>>Ah. Here is your view of what we are building.
>>>Note the huge discrepancy between this and what I
>>>described.
>>>
>>"Dammit Kirk, I am an engineer, not a doctor!"
>>
>>Damit, Eric, I am a hacker not a teacher.
>
> :_)
>
> Not to worry. It was just an exercise in explaining why
> we have no specifications.
>
> Multiply the difference between your vision and mine by
> the number of people in the room, and that's how many
> "OHS" designs we have. (02)
This is why I'm not trying to develop an OHS, just some functional
tools for authors. The "synthesis" that is occurring right now is
happening at the code level, not the design level, such that I can
fairly easily incorporate other projects (like XML parsers, HTML
markup cleaners, node visualizers, etc.) into my project, as part
of my design. The tools of developers and the means of sharing
them have greatly improved over the past years, what with the
advent of open development environments such as Java, Gnome, etc.,
open source [libraries], and now, open data [XML]. (03)
Problem is, we haven't learned how to cooperate at the design level
in the same ways. We need an open design methodology that works in
providing requirements handling, resource planning, legal council,
a whole slew of things that individual developers don't have at
their fingertips (and thank God don't need much either, otherwise
we'd be stumped too). (04)
If we were all "renaissance men" we'd be able to do it all ourselves,
be a teacher, a hacker, a lawyer, a project planner, whatever. What
we can do as a group is allocate our talents appropriately, but as
has been pointed out, resources are in short order when everything
is on a volunteer basis. (05)
Murray (06)
......................................................................
Murray Altheim <http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/>
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK (07)
In the evening
The rice leaves in the garden
Rustle in the autumn wind
That blows through my reed hut. -- Minamoto no Tsunenobu (08)