Giovanni Corriga SqF 2007
Last updated at 10:02 am UTC on 28 December 2009
I am Giovanni Corriga. I've been part of the Squeak community since 2002, first as a lurker on the Squeak-dev mailing list, then as a more active member of the community.
I'm currently the Team Leader for Squeak's News Team, and I'm one of the editor and admins of the Weekly Squeak. I'm also one of the admins of the Beginners mailing list.
Like other candidates, I believe that the role of the Foundation (and of the Board) is to coordinate (and sometimes even guide) the Squeak community, but that it shouldn't make technical decisions. That should be the task of a technical committee. In order to create this entity, I'll propose to the Board to appoint permanent Release Manager and Release Team. The Team will coordinate the development of Squeak and production of new Squeak releases and will stay in charge for more than a single release. The Team should be composed of more than two or three developers.
Q&A
Will you do your best for helping people developing applications in Squeak have their work respected on the long run ? (which means attention to backward compatibility, and resisting the temptation to drop large chunks of code from the image just for the sake of cleaning it up)
I don't think that this task belongs to the Board. Instead, it should belong to every Squeak developer and user. As a member of the community, I'll try my best so that everyone's work is respected.
As for backwards compatibility, that's more a problem for a Release Team/Technical Committee.
How do you plan to work with the various projects in the Squeak community, including Seaside, Sophie and Croquet?
Like the previous one, this is more of a technical decision. The Board may help in this regard, but can't have a prominent role.
Given that you're being elected for a period of one year, and working with a volunteer community, please nominate one commitment you can make to improve the world of Squeak in that time. I'm not looking for any Herculean tasks, but something SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and tangible), so we can look back next year, and see how much better Squeak is as a result of your involvement with the board.
I'll work towards creating a stable Release Team that can coordinate Squeak's development.
I'd also like to revive the Community mailing list, a mailing list dedicated to organization of Squeak and Smalltalk-related events. I'll try to have people organize an event at least every two months (so, six events in a year).
I'll also support other board initiatives, such as the relicensing effort and the incorporation of the Squeak Foundation.
Squeak 3.9 looks to many people more like a researchers working image than a release that is universally usable. Media people seem to stay with 3.8 and some server users even with 3.7. Squeak traditionally stands for media. The big publicity, developers talent, time resources and funding is on the side of the media developers and their user group make up the majority of Squeak users. Something definitely went wrong. One idea would be to adopt the Croquet deployment\Homebase.image as a second line of official Squeak images. Are you aware that the biggest problem for squeak.org is this split of the community and if so what are you planning to do about it?
Well, this is mostly a technical problem. If the split happens for a perceived lack of quality, there isn't much the Board can do. Nonetheless, I believe that having a Release Team may help bring these problems in the spotlight before they become too serious.
What is your bias - do you see Squeak as:
- an environment for developers?
- a tool for bringing programming to kids?
- (or) can you justify being split both ways?
I really don't see why it can't be both.
Do you support stepping up fundraising and if yes what do you propose to do with the money collected?
Do you support bounty projects? If so can you lay out how you would like to see a bounty program administered?
I support fundraising on the condition that we actually spend the money we raise. This means that part of the money will have to set aside for infrastructure expenses (servers, network traffic etc.) and foundation expenses (becoming an incorporated entity will likely has some costs). The other money can be spent in various ways: for example, in a bounty program, or to reimburse travel expenses for people going to conferences and events to talk about Squeak, or to hire a technical writer to produce a Squeak reference manual.
As for the bounties, I still haven't an opinion on how to administer such a program. But I think that the GNOME Bounties program may be a good model.
I think improve the image going to a Developers way can benefit us with more developers, companys etc.. supporting Squeak. Squeak is the only Smalltalk flavour opensource thath could be "fight" versus commercial smalltalks.
What do you think about this? How you will help to get a good GUI Builder (for example), and other packages very importants to get a more "profesionnal" image (profesionnal on more comercial projects based on..)
Reaching feature parity with other Smalltalk dialects is yet again a technical task. The board can help the community (by setting bounties, etc), but it's a task that should be completed by the community.
1) What is the orientation you favor with respect to Squeak's development? Are you more inclined towards Squeak as a tool for research or Squeak as a potential commercial development environment?
2) What importance do you give to packages like ODBC and Seaside?
3) Any plans regarding Squeak's UI? Will we revamp Morphic, use Morphic 3.0 or push the development of something like Tweak ?
There's no reason why Squeak can't be both a tool for research and a development environment. As for the other question, they're technical problems.
