Minutes drafted by Su-Ling and improved by Eugene:
OHS Meeting 6/1/2000, SRI Engineering Bldg, EK255
Present: Doug Engelbart, Marcello Hoffman, Pat Lincoln, Eugene Kim,
Eric Armstrong, John Deneen, Warren Stringer, Joe Williams, Tom Hill
(conference call), Mary Coppernoll, Su-Ling C. Yee.
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.
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.
3) Doug talked with Marcello (before meeting) and came up with four
basic vectors to get off the ground:
1. OHS is the foundation
2. Finding an organization that will take over the organizational
operational support. An eg of the need for that is international
groups like the Millenium Project.
3. Building the DKRs.
4. A Fellows program. Inviting people -- executives, technical,
HR, etc. -- from other countries and organizations to participate,
where these people meet and work on a plan for an organization,
building from their experience. Mei Lin Fung, native of
Singapore, has spoken with Singapore government who is ready to do
this.
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.
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.
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.
Eugene has taken all three summaries that have been done thus far and
suggests we work on them to produce the statement for Pat.
Marcello points out that in marketing, we need to target individuals,
look for the hook.
6) John suggests a lead: Francis Heylighen who has a cooperative
research agreement with Xerox.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Eric asked for a description of Augment's data structures. Doug said
that was easily doable, and promised to put a presentation together.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Warren proposes we have a show and tell, a presentation of what people
in the team would like to do.
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."
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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Remember four years of good friends, bad clothes, explosive chemistry
experiments.
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