Swarm SFI-Hive Pheromone, October 1999

[Alex Lancaster]

                  The (last) Swarm SFI-Hive Pheromone
                          Volume 4, Issue 2
                          October 31, 1999


   The Pheromone will stand to inform users of the activities and
goals of the hive and user community.  Contributions are accepted that
announce Swarm-related events or activities in any of the growing
Swarm colonies around the world.  To contribute, send e-mail to
<address@hidden> or <address@hidden>.  The Pheromone is mailed out if
and only if there is information to be disseminated.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Well, plenty of information to be disseminated, since we've been
  saving it up since the last issue in February!  Well, sad to say,
  this will be the *last* Swarm SFI-Hive Pheromone.  The next
  Pheromone you receive will be from the *new* SDG-Hive!  What's that,
  you ask?  Read on...

Table of Contents

   I. Swarm's new home!
      A.  santafe.edu -> swarm.org
      B.  What does this mean in practice?
      C.  Initial SDG board and officers elected
      D.  A Hive doesn't live on honey alone...

  II. Announcement -- SwarmFest 2000 to be held in Logan, Utah!

 III. The rest of the buzz...  
      A.  Comings and goings
      B.  Agent simulation meeting in Chicago

========================================================================

   I. New home for Swarm
   ---------------------

   A. Goodbye _santafe.edu_, hello _swarm.org_!
      
  As of the end of October, the Swarm Project has officially relocated
from the Santa Fe Institute to it's new home: the Swarm Development
Group (SDG), our web HQ is:

   http://www.swarm.org

  As noted in Irene Lee's earlier announcement on swarm-support, the
Swarm Development Group has been incorporated as a private,
not-for-profit organization whose goal is to continue the advancement
of the Swarm Simulation System and support of the Swarm user
community.

  The Santa Fe Institute is providing support by donating several
machines (a Sun workstation, a Mac PPC with LinuxPPC and a Windows NT
box), and loaning some others to the SDG, during this transition
period.  

  The new offices are located in downtown Santa Fe, and we will
ultimately serve the ftp, website and mailing lists over a broadband
Internet link from the SDG which we expect will be installed in the
coming months.

  B. So what does the transition out of the SFI mean in practice?

* The copyright of Swarm will be transferred from the Santa Fe
  Institute to the Swarm Development Group.

* The SFI will phase out it's direct involved in the administrative,
  funding, software development, engineering and technical support
  aspects of the project.

* The existing mailing lists, ftp and website (which is already
  undergoing migration) will continue to operate as normal out of the
  regular "santafe.edu" locations for quite a number of months to
  come.  We'll keep you posted about any changed required.

  C.  Board of directors officers appointed 

  The initial board and officer positions were appointed in September
and is currently (we expect to be adding more):

  Marcus Daniels, Secretary <address@hidden>
  Alex Lancaster, Treasurer <address@hidden>
  Chris Langton <address@hidden>
  Irene Lee, President <address@hidden>
  Glen Ropella, Vice-president  <address@hidden>

  This is the governing body of the SDG; the board will set the
direction and resolve issues pertaining to the operation of the
not-for-profit organization.

  D. A hive doesn't live on honey alone...

  With the generous support of the Swarm community, we aim to hire a
staff of five full-time employees including three programmers (one
dedicated to providing technical support to the community), a
technical writer, and an executive director/conference planner.  Swarm
will remain free software under the L/GPL license and the Swarm
mailing lists will remain a source of free information.

  Please contact Irene at <address@hidden> (or the website
www.swarm.org) for detailed information concerning membership rates
and benefits.

  II. SwarmFest 2000:  March 11th-13th 2000
  -----------------------------------------

  The Geography Department¹ and the RSGIS Lab² at Utah State
University³ in collaboration with the Swarm Development Group, Santa
Fe, New Mexico, are pleased to sponsor SwarmFest 2000, the fourth
annual meeting of the Swarm User Group.

  SwarmFest 2000 will run from Saturday March 11th to Monday 13th, at
Utah State University in Logan, Utah.

More details (and a conference website) will be forthcoming.  Please
contact either Irene Lee <address@hidden> or Dr. Paul Box at Utah State
<address@hidden>.

¹ http://www.nr.usu.edu/Geography-Department/GER.html
² http://www.rsgis.usu.edu
³ http://www.usu.edu

 III. The rest of the buzz...
 ----------------------------

  A. Comings and goings...

  * Vladimir: After working with the Swarm project for almost a year, Vladimir
Jojic, left SFI in early September to continue pursuing his interests
in functional programming and theoretical computer science at the
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.  We wish Vladimir well in
his future graduate studies, and hope that he is careful with those
trampolines over in Illinois. <grin>

  * Marcus: Marcus Daniels will continue as a programmer with the
Swarm Development Group, after relocating his quite sizeable
collection of technical manual folders to the new SDG downtown
offices.  Marcus has also begun organising the motley Swarm of
machines into the local swarm.org LAN, which will initially be
connected to the outside world via an ISDN connection, and ultimately
via a fast SDSL (> 1 Mbps) link...

  * Alex: Sadly, my official role as Swarm developer at the Santa Fe
Institute ends as of the end of this month, and I'm moving on to other
things at SFI.  I will continue to remain involved with the Swarm
project via the SDG board, SwarmFest and expect to continue to help
Paul Johnson and the community with Red Hat package maintainance, and
will hopefully still have time to write the odd line of Swarm code
from time to time <grin>.  I'm also taking a leave of absence from the
SFI for bit over two months, and expect to be back in mid-Jan.

  B. Conference on agent simulation in Chicago

  Marcus and Irene attended a successful conference on agent
simulation in Chicago in mid-October: organized around three themes of
principles, practices and toolkits.  The conference was organized by
Argonne National Laboratories (http://www.cas.anl.gov).  Marcus
presented a heads-up preview of new Swarm technology, including
potential integration directions of Swarm with other technologies
including XML, Scheme and Java.  The presentation can be found at:

  http://www.santafe.edu/~mgd/anlchicago.html

=====================================================================

Well, that's the last official Pheromone dispersal from the SFI-Hive,
see you next at the SDG-Hive!

Regards,
  
 --- Alex Lancaster for the Swarm Development Group