Preview of Swarm-hive activities...

[cgl]

Hello folks!

  In the last month, we've been undergoing an intense review
of where we have gotten to with Swarm, and where we should
be aiming to go in the near and long-term future.

  The result of our internal review was, basicly, that we're
satisfied that, with a few remaining tweaks here and there,
the basic foundation of swarm, the kernel, is essentially 
done, and that it is broad enough and provides enough 
support for just about everything we want to do from 
here on in. We've *really* appreciated and benefitted
from the hard-work that a large number of Beta-users
have undertaken to implement their own models in Swarm,
and the feedback they've given us has been critical in
keeping us from getting lost in the details. 

  So - the current status is as follows...

  The foundation of Swarm is in place, and most of our 
attention over the next year will be focused on the
multiple constructs that can and should be built on
that foundation - in a sense, we've been waiting for
Swarm to be ready too! Much of the higher level
stuff that we want to provide will run on the
Swarm kernel as well, and we've been focusing on
getting the foundation firmed up before we 
turned to the first, second, and etc. stories....

  But...we`ve been plotting and planning and architecting 
those higher stories all this time, and now we get
to implement them. Much of this work will take the
form of adding extensively to the libraries, providing
a much larger spectrum of building-block objects 
that people can start with and use to build their own
higher level constructs to suit their own application
domains. 

  In the next week, we'll be sending out a number of
documents detailing our plans for the short and 
long term future....

  Specifically, we'll be posting (in approximately
this order)

        1) A detailed statement of the library objects
           we plan to add in the near future (including
           visualization tools, analysis tools, 
           experiment management tools, tools
           for interacting with other processes...etc.

        2) An extensive Beta-survey to reap the collective
           wisdom and experience and hopes and dreams
           (and maybe even nightmares!) of the folks
            who have done battle with the beta versions
            of swarm.

        3) An announcement of the first Swarm-Users meeting
           to be held here in Santa Fe probably mid-February
           next year, during which Beta-users will be able
           to meet each other and us, and show off their
           models to each other, and for which we will
           be preparing a number of tutorials on the
           use of swarm and what we consider to be 
           proper approaches to simulation yielding 
           comparability and repeatability of results, etc.

        4) A restructuring of our Web pages to provide 
           much more support for user-community interactions
           (we will be providing a user-index area where
            folks can provide links to their stuff, managed
            by a search engine so other users can find who's
            doing stuff relevant to their work. We'll also
            have a user-contribution area through which folks
            can kick-back tools and library objects that
            they've developed which might be useful to 
            other folks out there....and so forth.)

        5) Our plans for converting from Beta mode to 
           V1.0 release mode, and some suggestions and
           queries about how we all - developers and users - 
           can best continue to develop and maintain Swarm
           in the long-term future, committed as we are
           to public-domain distribution of Swarm and 
           the "grassroots" community model of development.

  So - the relative silence over the last month or so was
actually accompanied by a lot of intense introspection and
planning on our part here. We will now be putting out 
incremental releases of the kernel, libs, and apps on
a more frequent basis and, hopefully, be rapidly increasing
the utility and ease-of-use of Swarm.

  Stay tuned!

Chris Langton
for the SFI Swarm hive (Roger, Manor, and Glen)