Invitation to join the Swarm Development Group

[Irene Anne Lee]

Dear Swarm User/Supporter, 

   On behalf of the Swarm Development Team, I invite you to become a
member of the Swarm Development Group (SDG)! 

The Swarm Program will be relocating from the Santa Fe Institute to
the Swarm Development Group located in Santa Fe, New Mexico this
coming November.  The Swarm Development Group is being 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. 

With your generous support, 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.  The Swarm Simulation System
will remain free software under the L/GPL license and the Swarm
mailing lists will remain a source of free information. 

The SDG currently has two parallel development goals planned. They
are: 1) to improve Swarm usability and 2) to improve the scalability
of Swarm.  Instrumentally, the primary development tasks are to
provide a visual modeling/programming capability and to realize the
logical model of concurrency for multiprocessing and distributing
computing environments.  However, note that development priorities
will be set by the SDG technical interest groups and the SDG board of
directors, both of which will reflect the membership of the
organization. 

The governing body of the SDG will be the board of directors; the
board will set the direction and resolve issues pertaining to the
operation of the not-for-profit organization.  The subcommittees
(technical and otherwise) will be decision-making bodies with
representation from the user community. The SIGs (Special Interest
Groups) will be self-evolving groups, based on enough interest in a
particular field to warrant SDG support. 

The SDG is the only and most effective support mechanism for the Swarm
package.  Please join us in making the Swarm Development Group a
success. Visit our website at www.swarm.org or contact me at
address@hidden for detailed information concerning membership rates and
benefits.

Sincerely, 

 Irene Lee