[Squeakfoundation]Brainstormin'

[Dan Ingalls]

[Anyone in a hurry can skip the first 6 paragraphs...]

>Maarten Maartensz <maartens@xs4all.nl> wrote...
> >Reason for my questions: There is little point trying to set up a
>>Foundation if the Central - where most coding and coordinating still
> >happens - has other plans or targets than the planned Foundation.

and cg@home.cdegroot.com (Cees de Groot) replied...
>No worries here. Dan will outline the details tomorrow, but maybe it says
>enough that he's the designated Executive Director of SqF and a core member of
>SqC.

and I added...
This could look like "why bother/still run by SqC", but our intention is, on the contrary [and here's the one-minute answer to your original question...], to put SqF in charge of the artifact and community, and for SqC to become "just another" participating group.  My significant presence in the interim structure is not to recreate the past, but to ensure continuity while we move on to the future.

Then Maarten Maartensz <maartens@xs4all.nl> wrote again...
>(1) I've still not seen Dan Ingalls' clarification (promised by last
>Tuesday), so Squeak Foundation seems on the moment mostly academic,

Well, I owe you all an apology.  My life is really over-full right now (wife recovering from back surgery so I'm Pop, Mom and bus driver as well to 3 kids and 3 dogs;  3.2 waiting for final touches (thanks, harvesters!); and modules and a pile of other updates waiting to go out into 3.3;  plus (and this is the real problem) I've recently decided to produce and sell a real Squeak-based product.  Oh, and the snow has been really great this week ;-)

My recent strategy has been to put times on my promises, as I did with this one, so people will remind me when I fall behind.  Thank you, Maarten for the reminder (and Cees who did so privately as well).
------------

This brings to mind a useful way to approach the whole question of what SqF is about (charter) and how it ought to operate (process).  What if I, and all of SqC had to drop out?  I don't mean just from SqF, but from Squeak in general, then where would we (I'm speaking now as just a community member) be?

I'm planning on sticking around but, almost by definition, if we can figure out how to carry on without SqC, it would appear that SqF could achieve a fair amount of its most important purpose, namely to carry on.

The Interim Structure addresses some of this need by reifying various parts of our continuing existence (harvesting, updates, releases, etc) as projects with committees to carry them out.

Here are what I see as the key roles that SqC has been playing that have not yet really been addressed:


1.  Decisions about code quality for lots of the stuff that goes into the system.  This has actually been relaxed a lot in the last year, as we have let more in through the more SqF-style harvesting process.

2.  Decisions about what should and should not go into the image.  This, too has been relaxed a bit, but I can point immediately to a number of things it might be nice to have in the image that we have not put in:
	Morphic Wrappers
	Connectors
	Linda
and, as I write it I realize this is a huge list -- basically everything we've done.  How have those decisions been made and why?  How is easy:  I and the others in SqC have made them.  Why is not so easy, but it takes us into the interesting territory...

3.  Decisions about what Squeak "is" -- what are its strengths, how it should be "positioned" and presented, who are its likely customers, and what will make it most immediately appealing and useful to them.


In the past we ran things as a sort of benevolent dictatorship.  We started with an unwritten charter for SqC, together with an unwritten "altruistic synergy" charter for the rest of the community, and then made decisions 3, 2, and 1 above consistent with those charters.

[In re-reading the above paragraph, it sounds a bit bombastic.  I don't mean it at all that way.  By "we" here, I mean to include all the great people in this community who have helped to keep things going up to now.  That is why I know SqF will work]

So it seems that now is a time to make these charters manifest, and to reexamine them in the context of SqF and its future as we envision it.  If you look at the message I sent to this list on May 1, it is still almost completely relevant.  It was my attempt to verbalize the charter under which SqC has been and plans to continue operating.  I will paraphrase it to keep this message complete:

	The SqC charter is...
	To produce a computing environment that brings the
	arts and sciences to life for children of all ages,

	and the artifact that follows is...
	A malleable computing environment that supports scriptable
	multimedia content distributed over the Internet.

That charter is probably attractive to most of us simply because we have stayed together this long with it being implicitly at the core of our community.  The other "altruistic synergy" part that we have always considered in serving this community runs along the lines...
	Keep it cross-platform
	Keep it reasonably compatible with other Smalltalks
	Keep it fairly simple
	Include enough so the release image can demonstrate
		most of the cool things that set Squeak apart
These desiderata are really at the level of artifact, and I'm trying to think of what the higher level principle is behind them.  I think it's really to attract people who like the same things as we, and to maximize the sharing across platforms and with the larger Smalltalk community.

I want to cut this short, but I think it's enough to explain the SqC perspective, and to give some context for discussion of how things might work if, as I say, SqF were to take charge of the artifact and community, and SqC were to become "just another" participating group.  Just imagine that all of SqC got an irresistible contract to work in Hawaii for 5 years.  What would you come up with as a charter, and how would it play out for 3, 2, and 1 above?

It's my hope that having a module system into the release will help greatly to reduce the conflicts currently inherent in satisfying different parts of our shared agenda.  That's why I want to cut this short ;-)

	- Dan