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Folks -

A number of people have asked outright what's going on with Squeak Central and others may be wondering the same but not asking.

I thought I would take a little time out to bring everyone up to date, not only about to SqC itself, but also on some topics that spread out into larger community goals.

As you know, Squeak Central has reconstituted itself as an independent research group.  We are talking with a number of possible funding sources as well as with various potential collaborators, but it would not be appropriate to talk about details at this time.  The important thing is that we (and it is mainly Alan who is carrying this process) do not want to rush into any imperfect relationships, so it is taking some time to set up a situation that works for everyone involved.  I can tell you that our priorities remain...

	staying together,

	making a real contribution to science and education,

	continuing to work with the Squeak community,

	sharing our work actively and openly.

Of course it is often a bit harder to focus during times of change, but on the technical side, we've been putting energy into...

	sundry details of enabling Squeak content to load
		successfully over the web into any browser
		running on any OS on any computer,

	continued work on the scripting system and its
		relationship to squeak as a whole so that
		someday it can all be an organic whole, and
		yet it won't seem daunting at first encounter,

	increased support for composition of media within
		Squeak, seeking that "sweet spot" where things
		are still simple, but the capability spans
		most day-to-day needs while including the
		leverage of an integrated programming environment. 

You'll see some of this work in the next spate of updates (today or tomorrow), and probably more over the next month.

After issuing the pending SqC updates in the next day or two, I will contact the "iron men" who have helped in the past to see if they would be willing to take a pass over recently submitted updates, selecting those that seem solid, valuable, and making sure they work with the latest updates.  [This has been Stefan and Henrik in the past, as well as Bob Arning and others in SqC.  If you think you would be good at this, and would like to help out, by all means send me a message offline].  Finally, when they are assembled, I'll issue these other updates.

The process of judgement, QA, and integration of fixes and enhancements is crucial to the ecology of an evolving open system.  It is a systemic contribution whose value is probably greater than any single clever algorithm in the system.  While this has been handled informally in the past, either through my sporadic bursts of responsibility, or with the help of other committed souls, I feel that this would be an excellent early focus for SqF.  It takes work, but not too much, it needs to weigh the greatest good for the greatest number in the system and in the community, it advances the system, and it enhances the experience of a system that grows and improves with each contribution from its community.

The importance of merging contributions from the community brings to mind the need for a package architecture in Squeak.  Many people have already pointed out this need (it's even a current topic), so I don't think I need to argue the case.  The benefits would include:

	a framework for ensuring the composability of the
	various subsystems that make up a complete squeak image.

	the ability to pick and choose among various facilities
	and configure an image with these and little more.

	the ability to build minimal systems that are well-behaved
	with regard to facilities that are missing

But perhaps the most important benefit for the community would be to reduce the "tyranny of the monolithic image" by which too little gets included in the release for fear it would be too hard to strip out (Connectors, Cassowary, MathMorphs, for example), and too much gets included in the release for fear that if it is not included it will get orphaned as the system evolves forward (VM Construction, Wonderland, Speech Synthesis for example).

I propose that we start a thread on this topic (message to follow) to assess what we have to start with, and who might be willing to carry something through to completion.  As with many facilities in Squeak, I'm hoping we can strike a reasonable compromise whereby most code looks no more complicated, the kernel as delivered is well factored, people who just want to hack will not be burdened, but those who wish to produce well-behaved packages will have simple but adequate tools at their disposal.

Hopefully, just by coming together around this particular need, we'll generate some good cooperative energy.  But I think this project is also special in that, when completed, it will be the context for an entire future of better sharing and collaboration around Squeak.

That's it for now

	- Dan, for all of us at SqC