On 2 February 2011 20:44, Robert Bradshaw <rober...@math.washington.edu> wrote: > On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 7:33 AM, David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote:
>> Do you believe it would be easier to attract funding if those >> considering funding a project could see a set of goals and plans? Or >> do you think people/companies considering funding software projects >> would not care if a project had a plan? > > Most grant proposals and other requests for funding have very specific > plans, people, timelines, etc. attached to them. I realise that. However, it's also highly likely the individuals reviewing the grant applications would look on the Sage web site. > In light of your (and > other people's) concerns, I think it would be very good if there were > a more central location to see this, what people were working on, and > status reports. I would add to that 1) What the goals are, even if there is nobody working on them. Two obvious advantages to having this would be: * It could attract a student to work on a project, if he/she knows it is a goal, but nobody is working on it. * It could attract a commercial company to sponsor a particular piece of work if they realised one of Sage's goals would be beneficial to them. 2) Archive the status reports - move them from a Wiki to a read-only section of the web site. Just like the FreeBSD does. http://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2009-04-2009-09.html http://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2008-10-2008-12.html http://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2008-07-2008-09.html This would help get more realistic estimates of time for different tasks. Predicting times for software development is notoriously very difficult, even when people are paid to do the work. But making predictions based on the times to do similar work is one of the standard methods. It's not perfect, but is one of the better ways. With expereice of porting Sage to Solaris, I'd have a much better idea of the times to port to AIX or HP-UX. > I may have come across as portraying sage development > as too individualistic--much work is done by individuals, but the > level of a single grant with one or more PIs, their collaborators, > students, etc. with clear-cut goals and timelines has provided a good > level of organization that gets things done, but the funded grants > tend to be of narrower focus than all of Sage. Grants applications should have well defined goals - if not they would never be funded. > A steering committee might be a good idea, we have JSage which > somewhat fulfills this role. As a closed group, I think many of us would appreciate more openness, for more people to have an input. But ultimately William started the project, so he should have by far the most say of the goals. But I do think we need a set of goals, and some plan how to achieve them. > - Robert Dave -- 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
