Sounds like some reasonable suggestions to me.

It sounds like things are still relatively up in the air as far as who might organize a foundation.  John M.'s report said that one or more people at SS on Wednesday mentioned interest, though.

Would a good next step be to set up a mailing list to help get all interested parties involved?  I suppose the foundation could just be discussed on this list, but that might be somewhat disruptive.  Karl suggested setting up a Swiki, but I don't think that would be sufficient for real discussion (although it could be a helpful supplement).

The mailing list could be public, or maybe semi-private (like the Camp Smalltalk list, which is still not too hard to get added to).

Anyway, I'm just throwing out some ideas, hoping that the momentum doesn't get lost.

By the way, I was also poking around the apache site for information on how they organize themselves... see http://www.apache.org/foundation/ .

- Doug Way
  dway at riskmetrics.com


Tim Rowledge wrote:
> 
> This is my personal suggestion for somethings the Squeak Foundation
> could do for us.
> 
> Your Mileage May Vary. Contents sold by weight not volume. Not
> responsible for items left on carriage. Close cover before striking.
> 
> The key facility I see a foundation providing is a single, easy to deal
> with point of contact for people wanting to use Squeak without the
> excitement of being test-pilots.
> 
> One part of this would be a well kept, regularly maintained web presence
> that gathers together all the appropriate pieces and provides clear
> concise help on getting them downloaded, installed and started with.
> Virtually all these are available somewhere or other, but not in a nice
> clean package. A well thought out bunch of tutorials would make getting
> started in the squeak life much easier. Several good tutorials exist;
> combine them as appropriate to make a great one. A decent repository of
> sources to up to date VM and plugin components is needed; I imagine a
> CVS database would be a good way to provide that, but whatever is best
> should be used. This is not to take anything in the way of control away
> from people that provide the main porting work, more to make sure a
> clean, tracked, known good set of sources is available to all. A
> collection of known good projects/fileins/goodies is needed, along with
> documentation to explain them.
> 
> If possible some reasonable first line tech support would be nice; it
> would at minimum save people from feeling embarassed to ask 'dumb
> newbie' questions to the list at large.
> 
> An important activity would be feeding bug fixes and useful improvements
> from the test-pilot school into the mainstream stable system. This can
> be hard work, since things can rapidly drift apart, so a lot of care and
> testing and knowledge of the system is required. At suitable points, the
> stable system mantle can be migrated to a subsequent system. Deciding
> when to do this can be tricky. Improvements in modularity and the tools
> to manage it would help a lot, and some of this work is already being
> done with the StableSqueak project. For people to feel like trusting
> Squeak for commercial work, or simply work that is important to them, it
> needs some fairly serious engineering to tease out loopholes, snip off
> loose ends, fill in potholes etc.
> 
> With decent funding a foundation might be able to sponsor students to
> OOPSLA/ Smalltalk Solutions etc, support the GaTech Swiki, even perhaps
> run a conference. Maybe provide some money to encourage articles about
> Squeak in the general press. Hey, even more nice badges, neat
> sweatshirts and cool posters!
> 
> I think the foundation could be a really useful entity. I've already
> spent non-trivial time working on the idea with Dave and others (who can
> unmask themselves as and when they wish) and I'm happy to spend more
> time on it. I hope you are, too.
> 
> tim
> 
> --
> Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
> All new: The software is not compatible with previous versions.