ESUG considers sponsoring the Pharo Consortium
Il 05/07/2012 09:30, Stéphane Ducasse ha scritto:
BTW since everybody wants to give lessons here is our internal
process. A board member never votes when he has a conflict of
interest. For example when a student applies for an article
sponsoring (even 150 Euros), if a board member is in the group of the
student or may have any conflict of interest, the board member does
not take part of the discussion or the voting process. This is always
like that.
You should have said this before, since it answers many questions that
were asked. Nobody wants to give lessons.
Paolo
Sending email about this is great, because it makes the community part
of the decisions. But it doesn't eliminate the conflict of interest
inside the board. Note that CoI is not a problem, it is a fact of life,
but it must be handled properly.
exactly
When you are a member of an academic program committee, you are asked to
leave when your paper is being discussed. We are asking for something
similar in the context of the ESUG board; again, it is standard practice
and I don't see why there should be any opposition to this.
As the number two of my research center, I deal with it daily
for hiring people for their life, hiring phd students, engineers…
And this is always the same. Shut up when concerns.
Why people think that we do not apply that in ESUG board?
Because of my personality? May be this is a compliment :)….
If I were a member of the ESUG board, I certainly would do the same on
any decision that mentioned GNU Smalltalk.
Not only if one of your student send a request for summer talk, paper sponsoring or anything else.
Even not related to GNU. ;)
Now I see so much frustration in some mails that I laugh a lot.
Personally when I wake up the morning I feel good and I know that I'm doing a good
job for my community. Now may be I should do something else.
I believe that you are; for both Pharo and ESUG. And I believe
everybody knows the effort that you put into promotion of Smalltalk.
Thanks
But you shouldn't take things too personally: your effort requires you
to be more careful about not pissing people off, not less. :)
I do not know why we would be pissing people.
Pissed people would be taking our actions are aggressive or wrong but this is their misinterpretations not our actions.
Paolo
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Stephane,
I see here more and more over-reactions and I quite do not understand
these reactions.
I can not believe, that posters here do not like the success of ESUG or
behave jealous in some way.
But ideas/contributions like the ones Paolo (and others) posted here are
still valid and I am more than surprised, that people are angry about it.
But you answered many questions and that is ok - and I've seen NO
posting here so far saying, that the ESUG members are doing their job
badly. ESUG has been done quite a good job in the past promoting
Smalltalk in various ways.
Marten
No worries, it's just that drama threads like this are destructive and don't
serve any purpose :) The most vocal people often tend to be those who are
not even active contributors or community members.
I reckon the ESUG board should just have used the authority they were given
when elected and gone ahead with what they thought was a sound decision
(which is why there is a board). Who currently is on that board and how
they were elected is a completely separate issue. Any conflict of interest
was already highlighted and deemed acceptable when elected.
To clarify, I am not a candidate, I also did not cast a vote and I am more
than convinced that anyone who is willing to sacrifice their free time to
contribute to ESUG will be welcomed there with open arms ... I just have a
feeling the line of candidates is not that long :)
--
View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/ESUG-considers-sponsoring-the-Pharo-Consortium-tp4638238p4638428.html
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Hi Steph,
Thank you very much for these insights.
I must say I am a bit surprised how emotional this discussion gets. Nobody is
doubting that the amount and quality of work and passion you and others put into
Smalltalk as a community on one side and Pharo on the other are really worth a
lot. And of course the success of Pharo is a succes for Smalltalk. We as a
Community profit so much from the small and big things hapenning.
But this whole discussion is about another topic. It is about whether people
would like ESUG to spend between 2000 and 4000 Euros per year in support of the
Pharo consortium. I think we even haven't heard enough opinions yet to judge
what the community thinks. I guess you were prepared for negative responses, so
what makes you upset is hopefully not the fact per se, but the rhetorics.
I think ESUG should support the Pharo project. But ESUG should not seem to be an
entity that somewhat guarantees a steady cash flow for Pharo. Let's put it
another way: if an ESUG member/sponsor wants to support Pharo in particular,
they can always go for a membership or sponsorship in the Pharo Consortium.
So sponsorship is fine with me, and a cheaper membership level is also fine,
even when combined with additional sponsorship (e.g. when the ESUG conference is
a financial success and there's more money on the bank than needed), but I fear
that a corparate membership level would bring up the question of CoI over and
over again, for as long as there are people active in both entities. Which, by
itself, is neither bad nor a problem from my standpoint. Thinking of ESUG as
"neutral" or "independent" is an illusion, because it will always be run and
sponsored by enthusiasts - and an enthusiast cannot be neutral ;-)
Joachim
P.S.: So what did I do for the Smalltalk Community? My company sponsors ESUG for
a few years now, and I try to help promote Smalltalk by blogging and trying to
motivate VA Smalltalk users (because these are the kind of Smalltalkers I am in
touch with most of the time during my day job) to participate in the community.
I try to transport the enthusiasm, knowledge and code from the community into
legacy Smalltalk projects (again, mostly VAST). You could say I try to build a
sub-community in the VAST world that somehow feels quite offline for many
reasons. My company has spent quite some time and money on organizing events in
which VAST users can find out they are not the last ones on earth. Together with
Marten and Sebastian I do the Smalltalk Inspect Podcast, in which we try to
cover all Smalltalk dialects and all kinds of topics. I know this still is far
less time and passion than what you or Marcus or other Board members put into
the Smalltalk community, but I hope this shows that my intention here is to help
build and sustain the community, not to troll about the ESUG board.
"Stéphane Ducasse" stephane.ducasse@inria.fr hat am 5. Juli 2012 um 09:30
geschrieben:
BTW since everybody wants to give lessons here is our internal process. A
board member never votes when he has a
conflict of interest. For example when a student applies for an article
sponsoring (even 150 Euros), if a board member is in the group of the student
or may have any conflict of interest, the board member does not take part of
the discussion or the voting process.
This is always like that.
Now as a good exercise for our little community, it would be good that
everybody check what he did recently not for its own little
assets (my little program my precious my little business my precious) but for
somebody else asset.
I wrote and edited the seaside book and I should have better wrote something
on ruby on rails
because we earned a ridiculous amount of money and it was 4 years of work (but
this does not count) and I pushed so that we get
all dialects represented, while I could have simply focus on Pharo.
Similarly, we sponsored conferences like FAST and Smalltalk Solutions,
summerTalk projects, user groups and we are systematically promoting
Smalltalk.
Now I'm a bit worried about some reactions especially the rhetorical part of
them. It seems to me
that in our community we do not like success - probably because this is better
to be the king of a small castle than
a knight in a kingdom. Personally I would prefer to be able to build graphical
system like D3 in Javascript with my Smalltalk but I cannot. So may be
Javascript is
the future of any smart smalltalker.
Personally I want the success of Smalltalk and I built the tools to make it
happen. Pharo is one of such tool. We built pharo because the tools in
presence
were not there to push the way we wanted. Just for your information, we are
making pharo not for US but for people to be able to
make money with it. Now if somebody would come, fork pharo and make our dream
reality by being better than pharo we would
be more than happy. Why because doing pharo is a pain. People complain, doing
is slow, we have other agendas.
I'm talking with lawyers INRIA since two years for the consortium. INRIA put
180 Keuros for pharo on the table and we are negotiating to get another 60 K.
Our little team will also put 30 Keuros plus a massive amount of our free
hours. Of course smart people can think that this is because this is for us.
No it is not,
we are building pharo for the community. In fact I would like to build other
systems than pharo but so far the state of the system
implementations does not let us experiment (proprietary or old systems), so we
are basically forced to build pharo if we want to invent our future.
May be some people do not want to have a future. But we do. Now you can not
trust us or be against it this is your rights.
So it would be a problem that ESUG the organization promoting Smalltalk has a
problem
to pay 2000/4000 Euros, when I see what our group is putting or INRIA.
Seriously, if this is the case we should really be clear about that and
rethink what is ESUG and also probably do something else of our free time.
Stef
On Jul 5, 2012, at 8:49 AM, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
Il 05/07/2012 08:47, Stéphane Ducasse ha scritto:
Reading this thread after all we did for Smalltalk is quite taught.
The wolfs are back apparently. Sad period. I think the esug board
will have to really decide if ESUG is worth after all. Now may be
ESUG popularity is a problem for certain people or this is the pharo
popularity. May be this is good to not give a chance to a promising
open source project (especially when we see that such question never
arose when it was about other Smalltalks). Life is so funny
sometimes.
No Stephane, it's not that. Part of it is just misinformation and I
think that was clarified; the other part is just basic handling of
conflict of interest, and I think it's in ESUG's interest to keep its
usual level of transparency.
Paolo
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Gert,
Geert Claes geert.wl.claes@gmail.com hat am 5. Juli 2012 um 09:43 geschrieben:
No worries, it's just that drama threads like this are destructive and don't
serve any purpose :)
Not sure about that. It's some of the answers in the thread that made it that
way.
The question was clear: The board wanted to know what people think about this.
And I guess this question was asked because they've already knew there would be
a COI problem.So it was intended to serve a purpose.
This is good and I am glad they ask.
The most vocal people often tend to be those who are> not even active
contributors or community members.
That's what a community must handle: filter useful input from noise.
I reckon the ESUG board should just have used the authority they were given
when elected and gone ahead with what they thought was a sound decision
(which is why there is a board).
I see it like this: The ESUG board asked the community for help in preparation
of a decision. If they were absolutely sure, they wouldn't have asked. We should
help with input, and some people asked additional questions, hopefully the
ansers will help them come up with a final opinion.
Who currently is on that board and how> they were elected is a completely
separate issue.
Correct. As is the question if the Pharo efforts are good or bad.
Joachim
Since I didn't really see an answer to Michael Haupt's question, about what is the main Smalltalk dialect of the board members, I did a quick Google on their home pages, looking there or on CVs for which Smalltalk is mentioned. Obviously this is not an accurate method, and I'd much rather the board members answered the question - please, please don't get annoyed because Google says this, just tell us what the real situation is. But for what little it's worth:
here are the members of the ESUG's board:
President: Stéphane Ducasse <- Pharo
Treasurer: Luc Fabresse <- Pharo
Damien Cassou <- Pharo
Jordi Delgado <- Pharo
Marcus Denker <- Squeak, Pharo
Alain Plantec <- Pharo
Serge Stinckwich <- none on home page, adding various Smalltalk names to the search terms shows several, with Pharo giving most hits
If that's the impression a casual web browse gives, then even if it is totally and utterly incorrect, hopefully the board can understand why it seems reasonable to members who don't know all the details to mention potential conflicts of interest.
So, what does it mean that if so many on the board have a Pharo link? First, it's brilliant that these people are active in doing something for a Smalltalk, as well as their great work in ESUG. Second, it's brilliant that Pharo people are active in wider promotion of Smalltalk in general. And third, it's going to be rather difficult to have a sensible vote on the board, and discussions on the members email list may be a little tense :).
No worries from me, though. I think it's great what ESUG are doing, and great what Pharo is doing. Personally I'd rather not have ESUG sponsor Pharo, but that's just one person's opinion, and hopefully nobody gets upset about it.
Go Smalltalk!
Steve
On Thu, Jul 5, 2012 at 9:25 AM, Michael Haupt mhaupt@gmail.com wrote:
How long are terms?
as far as I know, we don't have such a thing:
- the board has no minimum/maximum size
- anybody willing to help seriously is invited to send an email to the
board to offer his free time. Then we ask the community during the
conference if they accept this new board member. - when somebody wants to quit to take back part of his free time, he
just does so (as Noury recently did after years and years of handling
ESUG's money, a job that requires a lot of effort and rigor). In this
case we ask all board members who is willing to take some more work to
replace the leaving member (and Luc accepted to do that, thank you
Luc).
You are right, we should improve our communication and probably have a
dedicated web page, let me add that to my todo list :-).
--
Damien Cassou
http://damiencassou.seasidehosting.st
"Lambdas are relegated to relative obscurity until Java makes them
popular by not having them." James Iry
Hi All
Reading the thread, I just wanted to add my .02 worth.
I have no problem in ESUG sponsoring Pharo Consortium, like it has
sponsored many other worthwhile Smalltalk related projects.
The history of decisions taken by the board is comforting as it shows
impartiality across dialects and initiatives. These facts speak more
loudly than
principles and discussion.
The quantum of sponsorship mentioned is very reasonable in the light of
other assistance given to much more focussed projects.
I believe that all dialects of Smalltalk have benefitted from the work
on Pharo and its use as a platform to evolve products like Seaside,
Magritte, Fuel and many others
which flow into the broader Smalltalk community.
I would like to publicly thank all volunteers on the ESUG board and the
Pharo group for their work and efforts which have made and are making
major contributions.
Please don't be discouraged by the discussion on this thread. C++ has
users, Java enthusiasts, and Smalltalk zealots! People are passionate
and want to see good things -
lets harness the positive energy.
At a technical level, I have had experience over 20 years of working in
various Smalltalks and attempting projects in C++, Java, Java Script and
various other languages.
Every time I come back to the comfort zone that is Smalltalk. It is
simply more "right", better and consistent than the other environments.
I have looked at Python, Ruby, Coffee Script,
Objective C, Erlang.... etc. There is still nothing with the breadth of
capabilities, purity, accessibility and openness (in the sense that an
average developer can get at the internals and implementation of the
language and libraries) of Smalltalk. Yes, it is old and there are some
messy bits and frustrations. Alan Kay himself has said he is frustrated
that there is not something better to replace Smalltalk. What I see in
the Pharo space over the last two years gives me hope that this could be
it. There is a critical mass of innovation and community activity that
is generating a very dynamic, capable system and eco-system. I would
hate to see the very good work of many towards this dissipated when we
are close to realisation of a really great environment. We should give
every encouragement to those pushing things forward.
Go, Stef, Damien, Luc, Marcus, et al....
Best
Graham
Damien Cassou wrote:
On Thu, Jul 5, 2012 at 9:25 AM, Michael Hauptmhaupt@gmail.com wrote:
How long are terms?
as far as I know, we don't have such a thing:
- the board has no minimum/maximum size
- anybody willing to help seriously is invited to send an email to the
board to offer his free time. Then we ask the community during the
conference if they accept this new board member. - when somebody wants to quit to take back part of his free time, he
just does so (as Noury recently did after years and years of handling
ESUG's money, a job that requires a lot of effort and rigor). In this
case we ask all board members who is willing to take some more work to
replace the leaving member (and Luc accepted to do that, thank you
Luc).
You are right, we should improve our communication and probably have a
dedicated web page, let me add that to my todo list :-).
On Thu, Jul 5, 2012 at 10:35 AM, Steven Kelly stevek@metacase.com wrote:
Since I didn't really see an answer to Michael Haupt's question, about what is the main Smalltalk dialect of the board members, I did a quick Google on their home pages, looking there or on CVs for which Smalltalk is mentioned. Obviously this is not an accurate method, and I'd much rather the board members answered the question - please, please don't get annoyed because Google says this, just tell us what the real situation is. But for what little it's worth:
here are the members of the ESUG's board:
President: Stéphane Ducasse <- Pharo
Treasurer: Luc Fabresse <- Pharo
Damien Cassou <- Pharo
Jordi Delgado <- Pharo
Marcus Denker <- Squeak, Pharo
Alain Plantec <- Pharo
Serge Stinckwich <- none on home page, adding various Smalltalk names to the search terms shows several, with Pharo giving most hits
Yes, I'm mostly involved in Pharo. I'm in board but not really active
at the moment because I'm living in Asia where I do some Smalltalk
advocacies in the vietnamese, korean and japanese communities.
If that's the impression a casual web browse gives, then even if it is totally and utterly incorrect, hopefully the board can understand why it seems reasonable to members who don't know all the details to mention potential conflicts of interest.
So, what does it mean that if so many on the board have a Pharo link? First, it's brilliant that these people are active in doing something for a Smalltalk, as well as their great work in ESUG. Second, it's brilliant that Pharo people are active in wider promotion of Smalltalk in general. And third, it's going to be rather difficult to have a sensible vote on the board, and discussions on the members email list may be a little tense :).
The board is aware of these problems and we are trying to take care of
all Smalltalk communities if there need some support.
Look at our promotion program here: http://www.esug.org/wiki/pier/Promotion
If you need some support for your program or to develop a new
community, just ask.
Regards,
Serge Stinckwich
UMI UMMISCO 209 (IRD/UPMC), Hanoi, Vietnam
Every DSL ends up being Smalltalk
http://doesnotunderstand.org/