Re: [Swarmfest2006] Keynote speakers -> use of swarm funds

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Rick Riolo wrote:
> or there is an item in there about how a student can try
> to name their own mentor organization, because none of the ones
> that exist are quite right. (its in the faq somewhere).
> so we could try that.
>   
Well, there are a lot of organizations involved, including heavy hitters 
like Gcc and Mono.   My general point is not to push any particular 
project at this point, but to build on the momentum and visibility of 
SOC to leverage our own resources.   In other words, spread the net for 
talent a little farther than the usual suspects.
> as it turns out, an ex-student here at UM (Ed Baskerville)
> would like to do something with Swarm or something related
> to ABM tools.
..although it's great if one of the usual suspects could be motivated to 
do something clever!  He's done clever things before..
> i don't know anything about the approaches marcus mentions below.
> building a new simulator sounds like more than a one summer project, tho.
> so it might take coming up with a plan that breaks
> the task up into summer-doable chunks.
>   
If you look at some of the projects on the SOC list, many are very 
ambitious.   I think that's kind of the point.  SOC can be expected to 
endure (like SwarmFest) and different students can take off a chunk a 
piece of the problem at a time if it proves to be too hard.  

Swarmfests are fine, but having that be the single effective reason for 
the SDG seems a little depressing, in particular the cult of personality 
thing w.r.t. Keynote Speakers.   Better to encourage coolness by 
performance than by throwing out authorities to admire.  But I 
understand I'm probably in the minority on this.

In response to Jim's point, though, I think some spark is needed to do 
something new in this community and to shoot for something more dazzling 
than to add, e.g. some blasted GIS widget adapter to some ABM toolkit or 
yet another parameter sweeping program.   It's just not fun to work on 
stuff like that.   It's slavery.  This is not to say that the SDG 
shouldn't also sponsor research, and possibly also basic maintenance 
support for various ABM packages, but in the context of something like 
SOC, there should be a generous interpretation of success and we could 
help rationalize it to Google.  Participants should go away feeling like 
they tried to do something hard (even if it is obscure or not directly 
useful) and were appreciated for trying.