1. What happens if you don't have a plan? 2. Who makes a plan?
Answer 1. People choose what to do themselves. For example, making a program that almost no one uses faster, maybe breaking it in some subtle way that is not noticed for a long time. Adding a feature "because it can be added". Making the program slower to load and larger by adding some table of data. Failure to do something that many people want done, but no one is inclined to do because it is messy or requires additional expertise not immediately at hand. Sometimes people suggest to other people (like professors tell students) what to do. The assumption here is the professor has better taste etc, which is not always true. You end up with a system that is a conglomeration of what people contributed, filtered by whoever had a last hand in deciding what to include, which means that occasionally good stuff gets left on the cutting room floor. Maybe the system ultimately becomes dysfunctional in too many ways and is dropped, perhaps to be replaced by something somehow "better". Answer 2. Some subset of participants, maybe a steering group, perhaps seeking consensus from a larger group. In an open-source (etc.) project this is unclear, since any single individual can take all existing code and make a project fork. Also, individuals can say that they don't want to do some task. This can, of course, be just the right thing to do in some conceivable circumstances. In a situation in which rewards are offered (e.g. money, advanced degrees, shares of stock, your name on a plaque), the group making the awards sometimes has more input on the plan. Sometimes a plan is made by an individual (allegedly the case of Steve Jobs at Apple). Regarding 'grants'.... The academic (or whoever) writes a Grant Proposal. or Proposes to do some work. The funding agency accepts or rejects the proposal. If accepted, the agency and the proposer typically agree to a contract. Maybe they write a "grant contract" or a "grant agreement". I mention this because Robert misused the term (and he is hardly alone in doing so...) A professor does not "write a grant to the NSF or Microsoft or the NSA". A professor writes a PROPOSAL or APPLIES for a grant. The granting agency AWARDS a grant. (or not) RJF -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
