On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 1:51 PM, Casey Ransberger <[email protected]> wrote: > I wanted to send this message out after the final status report, but since > that's indefinitely delayed (keep going!) I'm just going to do it now. > > Easy question: has keeping this dialogue open been useful to the folks at > VPRI, or has it been more of a burden than anything else?
"Burden" is not the word I'd use, but as everybody would agree, the S/N ratio has not been too high. I personal think that we, the folks at VPRI, need to take a bit of blame for that. We could have written more regularly what we are doing to steer the conversation. (But maybe using words like "foundation" and "new" in the title of the mailing list did not help us to have reasonable conversations^^;) At the same time, we did publish research notes and memos now and then, but very, very, little about them were brought up (Casey, you did mention some of it, I appreciate it!); some questions and discussions indicated that some people commented on our work without reading the original proposal or annual reports. That was slightly unfortunate. > I can definitely say that it's been very good for me, in that I learned a > hell of a lot reading all of the lovely papers posters cited. It's also been > a lot of fun meeting people who were interested in a lot of the same things > that I was. I learned a lot, too. > VPRI has done something pretty awesome and weird here, in that the dialogue > was wide open the whole time. As I gather, it was in the spirit of ARPA. > We've had our share of trolls, long-winded posters (raises hand) and just > general chaos. > > I really enjoyed the guy who called us all a bunch of Alan Kay fanboys the > other day by the way. That was just priceless. Like we can't think for > ourselves! > > (Alan if I can get an autograph after this I think I'll be set.) > > So seriously, has this been worthwhile? I'm not just asking VPRI folks, > though I'm DEFINITELY asking VPRI folks, I'm also asking everyone else on the > list. > > I learned a lot, huge win for me, and we talked in circles a bunch, some of > that was fun. > > I can also think of a few parts where I felt pretty strongly that it *was* > worthwhile. To throw out an example, remember when Dale Schumacher asked > pretty poignantly whether or not the original idea behind objects/messages > was similar to the actor model? That was like a blockbuster for nerds it was > so awesome. That totally rocked. > > That's me. Okay now talk amongst yourselves go! > > ? > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > [email protected] > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc -- -- Yoshiki _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
