Re: Swarm 1.2 has been released

[Roger M. Burkhart]

> Congratulations!

Hi Nelson!  Just a quick note before I leave tomorrow morning for ALife 6
at UCLA tomorrow morning.  I'm assuming you won't be there yourself, but I
will be seeing Marcus, Alex, Chris, and Glen there, and maybe Sven
also on our swarm-advisory-board.  (I wasn't planning to be there,
but ended up with a business trip to southern CA the first of next
week so extended to the weekend.)  You asked last month if the
program was floundering, but they were all hard at work on this
major documentation support release which was of course long overdue.
I stopped in Santa Fe one day just before Memorial Day and everyone's
pretty much in agreement on keeping the SFI-based program focused on
a core role only like we discussed after SwarmFest.

A bit of news that hasn't been officially publicized yet: Irene is resigning
from her role effective next week, but may still be available for some
contracting.  She was no longer sure what her appropriate role was, and
wanted to get out from under the still shifting messages from SFI
administration.  But the best message there is that they are supposed
to be coming through with another year's commitment for Marcus plus
another hacker-type programmer to work with him, while Alex will be
working more with researchers (including Walter Fontana) and some of
the larger community.  I'll get a better sense of things myself this
weekend, and then we'll be trying to enlist the swarm advisory board
as the main outside direction to the SFI Swarm program.  I may be in
touch by email in the meantime, but otherwise by the middle of next week.

--Roger

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