I compose music and design sound effects for interactive products at a music studio in San Jose, CA. Although I use Squeak, C and Java to create audio tools for internal use, I straddle the line between user and developer. In the past, I've written several audio applications, some in Smalltalk, including a real-time OS for arcade games on custom hardware. I'm currently creating a commercial application using Squeak. I'm also on the Squeak web team, the newly formed Squeak PR team and on the Steering Board of the Interactive Audio SIG (part of the MIDI mfrs association.)
I believe the Board has done a great job of bootstrapping themselves. The monthly reports have been great and as a user and supporter of Squeak, I see great progress. I think the Board can be more proactive about their progress and where they are headed. I propose that the SqF Board build a better presence on the SqF website. By this spring, I'd like to see:
Promotion of the Board on the site
State the Board's goals and how they will achieve these goals
Dynamic updates of the current progress toward their goals.
A place where team leaders and others can provide updates to their individual projects.
Completion dates for all Board projects
As a developer, I would like to see the MIT licensing project completed by this summer.
As a user, I believe Squeak should be made more accessible to users. While I certainly don't think that the Board should tell developers what and what not to develop - totally counter to my capitalistic endeavors - I do believe the Board will at some time be in the position to help influence community wishes and needs. Thus, I would like to see the Board begin discussing the possibilities of initiatives to support evangelizing to end-users.
I'm very jazzed about the NSF Grant that Alan, Dan, Yoshiki, Ian and Andreas proposed. I'd like to see the Board create initiatives to help support their effort with other Squeakers... perhaps being a conduit to help VPRI.
I'd like to see the Board have more visibility in the larger open source development community. Being associated with, or having a presence at, community events (such as Smalltalk Solutions Conf.) could help promote Squeak to other developers and open up avenues for funding. I would like to see the Board pro-actively work with the PR Team to develop a PR campaign for the presence at a minimum of 2 yearly events.
To be fair, the Board is still at a point of learning about itself and it's level of influence to the developer community. But I do believe the Board should be an advocate of the various needs of the Squeak developer and user community and provide guidance that an otherwise ad hoc group can not provide.
1. 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)
Personally, I believe that the code needs to stand on its own. The community is pretty fair, and while not impartial, the squeak-dev mailing list provides some bit of arbitration on most issues. I don't see how the SqF Board is in a position to dictate what code remains and what is deleted. However, there should be consistent technical goals that the majority can decide and agree on. In lieu of a technical committee, the SqF Board is the logical sounding board. Perhaps the Board can set forth a framework for the construction of a technical committee.
2. How do you plan to work with the various projects in the Squeak community, including Seaside, Sophie and Croquet?
I don't believe the SqF should promote, help, advance nor impede or obstruct particular projects - commercial or open-source. The board should remain neutral on specific projects.
3. 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 will reiterate the points above:
I propose that the SqF Board build a better presence on the SqF website. By this spring, I'd like to see:
Promotion of the Board on the site
State the Board's goals and how they will achieve these goals
Dynamic updates of the current progress toward their goals.
A place where team leaders and others can provide updates to their individual projects.
Completion dates for all Board projects
I would like to see the MIT licensing project completed by this summer.
I would like to see the Board pro-actively work with the PR Team to develop a PR campaign for the presence at a minimum of 2 yearly events.
I'd like to see the Board create initiatives to help support VPRI's NSF effort with other Squeakers. I don't have a specific timeline for this.
4. 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?
No, I couldn't agree that the "biggest problem for squeak.org is this split". (note that an ad hoc poll taken on the seaside mailing list revealed that most are using 3.9. Of course, an unscientific poll) I don't see that it's a split. Can you explain more?
But, as you may know, I do agree that squeak has not kept up with advances in multimedia features. I think this is true because we just don't have many multimedia developers. What we need to do is evangelize multimedia potentials of squeak to bring in multimedia developers that must have this capability to produce their products.
5. What is your bias - do you see Squeak as: 1) an environment for developers? 2) a tool for bringing programming to kids? (or) 3) can you justify being split both ways?
I don't see it as a split, I see it as inclusive.
6. 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 absolutely support fund raising and polling the community on where the money should go. First, the infrastructure needs to be maintained. That's a no-brainer.
I don't know enough about bounties to answer intelligently.
7. 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..)
I think the Board's job is to support squeak development by maintaining the infrastructure (website, servers, etc.) and then provide monetary support for evangelizing squeak to bring in more developers and more users. As the community grows, development will increase, projects will become more diverse and the cycle will hopefully continue.
8. 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 ?
Squeak has been shown to be a research tool and for commercial development. One has only to look at dabble db and OLPC and the potential of Sophie and Croquet. But, these are particular applications that should not be within the jurisdiction for the SqF Board to support.