Minutes: June 27, 2000    (01)

4-6pm, SRI Engineering Building, EK255
By Su-Ling C. Yee <yeemailbox@yahoo.com>    (02)

Present    (03)

• Armando Busick    (04)
• Mary Coppernoll    (05)
• Doug Engelbart    (06)
• Lee Iverson    (07)
• Eugene Kim    (08)
• Pat Lincoln    (09)
• Liberty McGeorge    (010)
• Joe Williams    (011)
• Su-Ling C. Yee    (012)

1) Action items decided:    (013)

• Eugene will reserve domain names related to OHS.    (014)
• Su-Ling puts list of RFP on WIKI.    (015)

2) Doug reported Washington news:    (016)

• SPC has government and private contacts, so when OHS gets off the ground they will pitch it to their community.    (017)
• He spent two hours at the NIH aimed at programs for National Cancer Institute and working with the genome stuff (BITEA program, Bioinformatics). Pat adds that something like the OHS will be excellent for worldwide collaboration on bioinformatics like the genome project.    (018)
• He also met with Jeff Conklin, GDFS. Conklin does a lot of facilitation, design and installations. He wrote the graphic IBIS (GIBIS). When they get done at Bell Atlantic they want to put it out as open source.    (019)

3) Fellows program. Doug got together with Marcello about starting a fellows program. One of Marcello's colleagues who specializes in organizational development has lots of contacts in Korea -- can get big companies signed on but wants something more specific. Doug says this would be a good challenge to get out along with the proposal.    (020)

4) Doug's upcoming presentation at Cadence and SourceForge. Cadence is worldwide leader, but their tools not fully integrated. OHS would be good tool for them. Doug asks for input. Lee says we should find out how they manage collaboration now. Address support, cost, integration issues, lock-in issues -- it's expensive to integrate old data into new.    (021)

If people want to start using the OHS, what are the support factors? Open source good because there's a user community and developer community which provides grassroot support. OHS is collaboration, community centric. Target is to solicit participants in a couple of months.    (022)

How do you really make a DKR? Important to put a plausible scenario in the proposal. Key with SourceForge is collaboration and integration. Lee says Doug should describe vision of how Doug's stuff will work.    (023)

5) Proposal discussion.    (024)

Pat says we need to get our OHS proposal shaped up so we can approach specific parties. Eugene asks if we're looking for people to write the proposal or content. Pat says both. Doug asks what would be the steps and how much money to ask for.    (025)

Pat adds that it should say what are the explicit steps, new things that we'd be building, and particularly the benefits to the organization. The proposal should be five pages.    (026)

Eugene asked Doug to define our next steps. Doug responded, it depends on what kind of files we would like to translate, the views to provide. If we're going to invite other open source people to be involved, we need to determine the files they use. Our first target should be email. We need to pick the program language we're going to use.    (027)

We agreed that we need to:    (028)

1. Start writing a proposal specifying more concrete steps, what it means.    (029)
2. Determine what we're doing and the tools we're going to integrate. We'll use a standard browser view first, integrating certain tools that aren't integrated yet.    (030)

Request for proposals thus far:    (031)

• NASA, July 13 deadline    (032)
• DARPA -- longer term but very strong candidate    (033)
• NIH, genomic information databases    (034)
• Private sources: Rob Glaser, Gordon Moore    (035)
• Countries: Korea, Singapore, Japan    (036)

Source Forge and VerticalNet may contribute effort and time, and money is not ruled out. Pat adds that we need to set up a structure for the OHS. SRI can be a home for it but does not control it in any sense.    (037)

Next week's agenda: Exactly what will go into the proposal and who will do it, and have the list discuss it. Doug will be the driver of it. Joe will start a WIKI item on it.    (038)

Lee mentions the DKS project at Los Alamos. Los Alamos typically gives away lots of money and does a lot of open source. Currently they have an arrangement with Xerox PARC. PARC is very intellectual property focused, and may not be open to open source. It might be worth approaching Los Alamos, who is also funding the Software Carpentry project.    (039)

6) License discussion. We set a July 6 deadline for commiting to a license. Eugene proposes we go with BSD. Lee mentions that it is so barebones, and that Apache is derived from BSD. Eugene adds that it's BSD with extra legalese. Companies prefer BSD because you can do anything with it. Discussion about BSD, GPL.    (040)

Votes cast so far: Lee is fine with either BSD or Apache license. Pat is BSD advocate. Eugene is obviously BSD.    (041)