Two comments:
a) That was "this week", not "this month".
b) I neglected to mention that in the informal
meeting, Su-Ying Lee and Joe Williams decided
to collaborate on taping Doug's Augment
presentation. That's going to be a big a help...
Eric Armstrong wrote:
>
> We had a rather good meeting at SRI this month.
>
> Highlights of the Formal Meeting
> --------------------------------
> This was the official meeting, held at SRI.
>
> * Joe Williams gave a high level "markety" overview
> of the thing we are planning to build. There was
> a strong general feeling that the picture he was
> presenting was not accurate, but the style and sense
> of focus was good. When *do* have an accurate
> picture to portray, I suspect he'll summarize it
> nicely.
>
> [One nice thing that came out of that presentation,
> for me, was that it brought it into clearer focus
> why I have been wrestling with data types. His desire
> to identify the "fundamental information unit" of
> the DKR made me realize that the real goal of the
> data structure design I have been doing is to
> (hopefully) identify one (or at most a few) "atomic
> data structures" that can be strung together to make
> everything else in the system. I think I may be
> close (future email).]
>
> * Lee Iverson gave a great overview of use case
> scenarios, describing the activities that actually
> go on in a software development project. Since we
> all agree that our initial target is to augment
> open source development activities, his overview
> (coming soon to a mailing list near you) provided
> a good list of activities to start on.
>
> To anticipate Lee's email just a bit, he divided the
> activities into 4 general scenarios:
> a) The (primary) development activities that go on
> before the product is released (designing, planning,
> coding, documentation, etc.)
> b) The (primary) development activities that go on
> after a product is released (bug tracking,
> suggestion lists, and enhancements).
> c) "Breaking in" a new developer (choosing a bug to
> work on, mining the code for rationales)
> d) User activities (reading documentation, asking
> questions)
>
> In an effort to prune the list down to the "first cut"
> activities, it was observed that some of the activities
> represented "formal language" processes, or "formal
> processes". Those activities included project management,
> coding, bug management, and testing. The rest of the
> processes were "natural language" processes, which means
> that the system which is effective for one is likely to
> be effective for all of them.
>
> [My inclination is to counsel a sharp focus on those
> activities, excluding the formal processes for the
> moment. The only conceivable counter argument is that
> the design really needs to take them into account, in
> order to ensure future compatibility with those systems.
> For some reason, my "gut feeling" is not to worry about
> it -- but I want to leave the door open for alternative
> views. It helps if we can restrict our focus, but...]
>
> * Doug is going to work with Lee Iverson to put together a
> system he can use to demo Augment in the very near future.
> Whenever that is ready, it will be item #1 on the agenda.
>
> * It is apparent that a large number of projects are currently
> underway in the "distributed collaborative project" design
> space. It was felt that we should use one or more of them
> to replace the fragile email medium we are using, so that we
> can get a better idea of what needs to be done, and use
> whatever the system gives us to help us do the design work.
>
> [I sent out the list of candidates yesterday. Apologies if
> I overlooked anyone's past contributions. Send them to me
> and I'll start v.2 of the list.]
>
> * Doug mentioned that Sun had donated a server for Bootstrap
> use. Whatever system we select might be hosted on that
> system.
>
> * We identified several important agenda items, and prioritized
> them. [Upcoming email.]
>
> Highlights of the Informal Meeting
> ----------------------------------
> This was the unofficial meeting, held at the Applewood Gourmet
> Pizza palace, where they have salmon pizza and barbeque
> chicken pizza, and all kinds of good stuff...
>
> * For maybe the first time, I articulated clearly the
> reservations I have about the transcoding approach:
> a) It *could* be a coding dead-end.
> That is, it might take us part of the way to where
> we want to go, but leave us with no good way to
> progress from there. I don't *know* that to be the
> case, but I'm concerned that it may be.
>
> b) The rather interesting tidbit of information that
> surfaced recently: That the folks who build the
> HTML-page-annotation system (Crit) found themselves
> using EMAIL to carry on discussions -- even though
> they tried to get each other to annotate HTML pages.
>
> [This led to the observation that there is something
> seductive about the email interface -- the immediacy,
> the way information comes to you, and asks only for
> a reply. That, in turn, led to the realization that
> email the right interface, but the wrong data
> structures. Add good data structures to the system,
> and the result should be interesting...]
>
> * A new member of the group, Debra England from McKinsey and
> Company (a group that focuses on defining and promoting
> organizational "best practices") kept asking: What is it
> that we are building? What are we about, anyway? I came up
> with one possible statement. Debra suggested that it would
> be a good assignment for the group to ask *everyone* to
> write up a concise statement (a sentence or a paragraph).
>
> [That "homework assignment" will be in my very next email.]
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