Hello Squeakers,

I would like run for the first time for the Squeak Oversight Board election in 2024.

I have been reading quietly on the Squeak mailing lists since early 1997.
Not many people know about me so why would they vote for me?
I have - at considerable expense- been building an archive of Squeak and Smalltalk related science papers, files, images, VM’s, source code and videos that has grown to terabytes.
We have seen that preserving image and virtual machine based software like Smalltalk-72, Smalltalk-78, Smalltalk-80 and Squeak can be kept running for 52 years in the future and I see it as my job to keep it running for another 100 years or so. Serving on the Squeak Oversight Board at some time in the future will serve to complete my preservation efforts. If you feel preserving all past and future Squeak software in a running form than voting me on the Squeak Oversight Board is a good way to help my efforts.

A personal history.
At 17 years old I had been blown away by the elegance, simplicity and scientific insights behind Smalltalk-80 and its GUI ever since I read the Byte Magazine articles in august 1981. Message passing and bytecode virtual machines are still the best architectural principles for building computer systems today, especially if you want to build message passing massively parallel computing systems. In 1983 I started my first attempt to re-implement Smalltalk from the Blue and Green Book as the VM, language and operating system for my 800 core Transputer supercomputer hardware. When Squeak was released in 1996/97 I was on this mailing list again trying to port the VM to the parallel hardware in my bedroom that I ran my first public internet provider on. Since 2008 when David Ungar’s RoarVM showed me how I am trying to rewrite the Squeak VM to run on the wafer scale integration million core microprocessors Jecel and I have been working on. We describe this work in a talk https://vimeo.com/731037615

If elected to the Squeak Board I want to organize that Squeak will run bit-identically on more hardware than Linux does. For example compiling the Squeak virtual machines on modern iOS, WatchOS, MacOS for all Squeak versions 1.1 to 6.1 including Croquet, compile for the 100 core AppleSilicon, Risc-V, several FPGA hardware, Android, Windows, etc. I want to port the parallel RoarVM enhancements into the mainstream VM, maybe re-introduce the object table and introduce the use of tags and distributed VM heaps. I can not promise to release all this work while on the Squeak Oversight board but I can try.

Thank you to the folks who encouraged me to run,

Merik Voswinkel

On Sun, Feb 11, 2024 at 9:53 AM Patrick R <patrick.rein@hpi.uni-potsdam.de> wrote:

Hi All,

It's that time again to raise your voices and elect your leaders!
Can you believe it's been over a year and one day already?

It's a time for you to stand up, help your community and volunteer to serve!

Squeak wants you!

Every year we elect the SOB (Squeak Oversight Board) consisting of
seven members from our community. The current board members are:
1. Marcel Taeumel
2. Tim Rowledge
3. Craig Latta
4. David T. Lewis
5. Jakob Reschke
6. Bruce O'Neel
7. Benoit St-Jean

For more info on the board please see:
https://squeak.org/board/#the-mission

Everything about the election, including schedule and more, is tracked here:
http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6665

Now until Friday 25th of February 2024, 18.00 UTC: Nominations of SOB
members and campaigning!

Candidates should nominate themselves and start their campaign on the
squeak-dev mailing list. Or if you nominate someone else, make sure
that person really wants to run. :) I will not put anyone on the
candidate list until that person makes it known on squeak-dev that
he/she intends to run.

During this period, the candidates should ideally present themselves
on squeak-dev, unless they have already done so, and the community can
ask questions.

I encourage you to reach out to potential candidates, people that are
active in the community and represent your views, and ask them to run.
Some people will not run without encouragement. Also, I know that
some people wait to the last minute to run for the board to see if
others will run but please consider getting this year off to a faster
start and just jump right in!

The schedule and process are as follows:

Now until Friday 25th of February 2024, 18.00 UTC: Nominations of SOB
members and campaigning!
Friday 25th of February 2024, 18.00 UTC: Candidate list is finalized.
Friday 25th of February 2024, 19.00 UTC: Online election starts.
Friday 11th of March 2024, 19.00 UTC: Online election ends.
Results will be announced immediately after the election ends.

The voting period is two weeks long and ballots are sent out via email.

And how do you end up on the voter list? See below. :)

IMPORTANT: New voters will NOT be added once the election is started.
You MUST try to get on the voter list before the 25th of February 2024
or you will NOT be able to vote. If your Email has changed please try
to make sure it is changed on the list of voters before the election
starts.

--------------------------

If you were invited to vote last year you are already on the voter
list, no worries! If you are a new Squeaker and wish to vote you
should do ONE of the following:

* Get a "known" Squeaker to vouch for you. If a known Squeaker
sends an email to voters (at) squeak.org giving me a name and email
for you, then I will add you.

* Send an email to voters (at) squeak.org yourself (and CC to
squeak-dev if you like) with information/arguments showing me that you
are indeed serious about voting and that you are indeed a Squeaker.

When the voting period starts all voters will receive an email with
instructions and a link to the voting website.

If there are any further questions, just reply *in this thread* and I
will closely track it - or send email to voters (at) squeak.org which
points to me.

...so let's get on with it!

All the best,
Patrick