Hi there VPRI! I think more transparency is needed from VPRI for the general public. Maybe I was not careful to read something you wrote in a PDF somewhere (I printed out many and read them on bus trips), so feel free to point me out to your documents and let me look things up myself if that answers a question I have here.
The lacking (concrete) information about you is kind of frustrating to browse and explore over the Internet for someone as curious about your project as me. I wonder how work is proceeding at VPRI. The last news I can find is the 2007 report, and some messages on the FONC mailing list and work on idst. I have no clue at all what is going on, or whether most of the VPRI staff caught the flu and was sick all those past few months. After reading several of your papers that I could find online and starting to fiddle with idst, I'd just like to have a very general birds-eye view of things, like: - Are you still in the starting phase of the project? This would maybe explain why I don't find much (well-structured, concise, guiding) information about it and why you (don't) struggle to keep your website up-to-date with recent developments. (And I rather see you research fundamentally new computer systems than fiddle around with boring old HTML.) - Are you working on a (very) diverse set of projects and/or more towards a whole, coherent system? What are those projects? - Are there already (many) people working on VPRI projects that are from outside the core group funded by the NSF grant? How is that group working together, and could it make its internal communications a bit more public? (Or are they and I just didn't encounter them yet? Or do you all communicate mostly on the phone, or even meet in person? Or do you work isolated from each other most of the time and teams of one don't need communication and hence no publicity anyway?) - How did it all start? (Where are your roots, how did the key people find together to do this project? What is the role of the "advisors"?) Where are you heading? What are the most interesting pieces you can show off and let (the computer-literate) people download and try out? (The things I looked at so far are the Lively Kernel and idst. It was quite cumbersome to find them and see that they are worked on under the VPRI umbrella.) What are the "core papers" to read? (Like, I've read the First Year Progress Report 2007 and didn't know what would be the best things to read next. Mind you, I'm studying Theology and not Computer Science (programming since the age of 8 though), and thus limited time makes me gladly reach for any shortcut through your tons of interesting papers that leads me to the things I'd like to get involved with.) - Is there a way you could keep the Internet community more up-to-date about your work at VPRI? Maybe NSF is fine with a yearly report (and sure requires you to do those), but if you wish to get the open source community involved, there needs to be a constant flow of tiny pieces of interesting information to feed interested parties. Typically, project websites include a news (front) page, a download section, and clear links to communication facilities (mailing list, wiki, IRC) - which are somewhat lacking or hard to find on the vpri.org pages. Some more concrete questions: - Are the "IS system" and the "COLA architecture" talked about in your 2007 yearly report identical to Ian Piumartas idst software system? Is idst the new name for COLA or is it a superset, containing COLA? - Is idst supposed to be the bootstrapping platform for all the VPRI things to come? I.e. is it "safe" for me to invest time into learning it and programming with it, or will it be thrown away again in the near future? -- Ok, the FONC mailing list does not have to have the traffic of the GCC mailing list, but it does worry me that the FONC mailing list has so little of it. I cannot imagine that this project is not inherently of deep interest to virtually most of the open source community! If there was no NSF grant, I'd call this a virtually dead project and would not touch it from a distance even, other than maybe having a look at it once a year. I want to see the VPRI work thriving beyond the NSF grant, and this needs more visible participation than it has now, at least from a open source volunteer point of view. - How is OMeta, described at http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~awarth/ometa/, related to idst? (Just saw "Platform: COLA: Coming soon", so will OMeta be based on idst? Will it be an essential part of idst, or even an evolutionary next step?) What's left to say? Keep up your important work! I'm basically fed up with (the clunkyness of) computers and I am by far not alone with that feeling (and I know I don't have to tell you, it's so obviously frustrating to use common computers). And thus I am glad for every minute of progress you make. So I almost feel kind of bad to let you waste your time reading all this, but maybe you could get more people involved in the project and thus accomplish more within your five year funding timeframe. At least I'd like to contribute towards getting the really great, but forgotten ideas of computer science implemented. I want to know more closely what's going on (right now) in VPRI so that I can contribute most efficiently, even if I have to limit my contributions heavily due to other priorities. Best wishes, Felix Rabe
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