TUNES website homepage draft

[Kyle Lahnakoski]

Brian Rice wrote:

> >Skilled people are required, but skilled people with time on their hands
> >are few and far between.  They are either enjoying their current
> >position, or are being paid well enough that they don't care to change
> >things.  These people will not gravitate towards TUNES.
> 
> I know. But that won't stop me from asking for grant money so that I
> and Fare and Tril and whoever else can spend time on it without it
> stressing us out too much.

Money can solve many problems.  :)


> Okay, I agree. I think finding a person with the talent (who like you
> said above was not comfortable where he was) to make this work right
> will be quite difficult. What would you suggest to add to my web page
> proposal? Or how would you re-organize it?

I have given that (short) reply.  Tril's was higher level, and contained
more general TUNES concepts and desires.  I would suggest that your
proposal be rewritten to act as an Arrow/Slate manifesto.


> There's a lot there that I think must remain in order to make sure
> that we don't look like fools. 

I see your concern, but you should only be dealing with how much YOU
look like a fool.  What I mean is that, in order to convert TUNES from a
clan of experts to an educational forum, TUNES must have branches that
look foolish.  These branches are experiments by the members to work out
their ideas, and then document their failure.  Tril has it right when
TUNES should not be an arena for competition, but an arena for
discussion.  It is to your advantage to distance yourself from TUNES,
lest it reflect on you.  Rather let your branches (Arrow, Slate) reflect
on you.  It should be under the Arrow and Slate names that you should
request funding.  In the TUNES arena you should only be a resident
expert.


> Well, then I apologize. But you should *still* go do some research,
> being committed as a TUNES member. Keep in mind that I've spent the
> last 7 years reading and re-reading the TUNES docs until I could
> grasp them in many ways and explain TUNES in many ways. I went out
> and bought Dover book after Dover book, and then modern CS and maths
> book after modern CS and maths book. None of this knowledge came
> easily.

I agree with you that research is required.  But TUNES needs a way to
take what you, Brian, have learnt and separate the useful knowledge from
the noise.  I am sure that much of your experience in research has shown
that TUNES-applicable knowledge is diluted out there.


> The 'elders' are all quite busy themselves. 

At a more general level I am promoting delegation.  We delegate the
programming to the newbies, and handle only their education.  We can
take this a step further and let the newbies also handle their own
education, the 'elders' take on the roll of editor; simply reviewing the
changes to the web site to make sure TUNES is not going downhill.  One
person can run a multibillion dollar company this way, certainly an OS
project with a few hundred can be run the same.  


> When will it end? I can't say.

It will be a long time before it ends.  Most people that get caught up
in TUNES are young and inexperienced.  As they age, they either loose
interest or loose the time that they can dedicate to TUNES.  The TUNES
site only has a small window to take advantage of.  We should be setting
up a system that can handle the continuous flow of people; educating
them fast, having them build prototypes, and delivering what they learnt
to the next generation.  


> That's just it. I don't see how the community could build TUNES at
> all without the initial time and theoretical investment. And before
> you contradict me, remember that I am the one who does the obscene
> amount of research for TUNES: 

I am saying that the TUNES site should be a dense repository of relevant
TUNES information.  I agree that all the information to build TUNES may
not be available now, but by making it dense we can improve the learning
curve of the newbies so each can add to the total information before
they burn out.  

I have no doubt that TUNES-The-Educator model will generate the
theoretical investment necessary to build TUNES.



Tril wrote:
> How's that for politics?  I don't like clashing of egos and any one
> person's software project can't be the system we want for TUNES.  A good
> environment for working on research is one in which each person claims
> ownership of his or her own ideas, not where everyone tries to create the
> "ultimate system" or be the first to write code etc.
> 

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Kyle Lahnakoski                                  Arcavia Software Ltd.
(416) 892-7784                                 http://www.arcavia.com