[squeak-dev] Squeak Oversight Board Election 2021

David T. Lewis lewis at mail.msen.com
Fri Apr 9 16:40:32 UTC 2021


On Fri, Apr 02, 2021 at 08:10:25AM +0000, Rein, Patrick wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> It's that time again (although with a new person telling you this). 
> Time to raise your voices and elect your leaders! Can you believe 
> it's been over a year already?
> 
> It's a time for you to stand up, help your community and volunteer to serve!
> 
> Squeak wants you!
>

I am running for the Squeak Oversight Board again this year.

I am a hobby programmer and long-time participant in the Squeak community.
I have contriibuted to some of the technical aspects of Squeak, but I am
most enthusiatic about using Squeak for learning and exploration, and for
music, arts, and thought experiments. 

Although my personal focus is mainly on Squeak as a tool for individual
use, I am also committed to ensuring that Squeak continues to be a preferred
medium for advanced virtual machine development, computer science, and
software development.

I expect some fundamental challenges in the coming years:

We will be challenged to evolve Squeak to be useful and relevant in an
internet-based world of smart devices and new ways of human interaction
with those devices.

We need to manage the tension between simplicity and adding functionality.
To me, it is essential to keep things simple and clean enough that a single
person can understand and explore any and all parts of the system. But we
also need to enhance and evolve the system. Balancing these goals is not
easy, but it is the job of the Squeak board to make it happen.

I am an enthusiastic user of git, and an extremely cautious advocate of
finding a simple and effective way to use it to support our Monticello
tools in the image. But see above concerning the tension between simplicity
and function, whatever we do needs to be easy to understand and explore
for a wide range of Squeak users.

Finally, we are a small community, and we need to find ways to make the
system and the community supportive of the creative work of evolving the
system and the virtual machine that supports it. I have no easy solutions
here, but this is critical for the well-being of both Squeak and of the
people who are contributing to it.

Please vote for me, and please also consider running for the board yourself
if you have not yet done so. We need people of diverse backgrounds who have
an interest in the progress of Squeak!

Dave
 


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