Wednesday 25 October 1995, 4:30-6:00 pm
In view of the limited time, and the shoreless magnitude of the
subject, the organizers of this BoF will stick to the following
framework. Our point of departure is that rapid changes in technology
will force the astronomical software community to change its ways. In
particular, we believe that the old-style monolithic package is
doomed. Therefore, we want to investigate the necessity, desirability
and (im)possibility of collective action. To this effect, we have
conducted a very useful preliminary Email discussion in the past
weeks, and we have prepared a proposal for a resolution to be adopted
by the BoF participants.
-) Welcome and opening remarks by Jan Noordam.
-) Summary by Will Deich of the FADS Email discussion, and of any points
that were made in ADASS talks and posters that are relevant to our
subject.
-) Proposal of the following resolution:
The participants of the `Software Futures' BoF session
at ADASS'95 ask the ADASS Program Organizing Committee
to appoint a small committee to investigate how the
astronomical software community can best face the
future, and to explore the (im)possibilities for
collective action.
The committee is to report its findings to ADASS'96.
-) Discussion of this resolution:
-) Jim Coggins (5 min)
-) Doug Tody (5 min)
-) Eric Mandel (5 min)
-) Brian Glendenning (5 min)
-) open discussion (10 min)
-) Vote on the resolution. If it is carried, the following mandate
is proposed for the committee.
** The Committee should investigate whether there is sufficient
need in the astronomical programming community to
investigate methods for allowing software entities to
interoperate with entities from other packages. If so:
o Which services would most profitably be made interoperable;
o What technological base for this interoperability should be used;
o What plan is required to design and widely implement
these solutions?
** The Committee should investigate whether progress is significantly
delayed in some areas of astronomical software due to a lack of
standards within the astronomical software community. If so:
o Are any of these areas ripe for standardization, but need
an outside hand to encourage things?
o What plan is required to move along the standardization process?
-) Open discussion of the mandate.
-) Vote on the Mandate.
-) Close
=========================================================================
Jan Noordam (noordam@nfra.nl)
Will Deich (will@nfra.nl)