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SDG 2002 Annual Report
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From: |
gepr |
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Subject: |
SDG 2002 Annual Report |
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Date: |
Wed, 8 Jan 2003 18:46:35 -0800 |
2002 Annual Report for the Swarm Development Group
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I. SDG transitions in funding and structure.
The funding for the SDG now comes solely from community
contributions. This revenue stream is not adequate to employ
any full-time staff; so, we are now a completely volunteer
organization. The money donated by our members and generous
contributors is used to fund our annual user's group meeting and
will soon be used to support the new efforts mentioned below.
Along with this funding change, several other changes have taken
place in the structure of the SDG:
1) Marcus Daniels resigned his full-time position as the sole
driver behind Swarm development and has moved on to greener
pastures. We thank him for his frequent and heroic efforts.
He's still on the board and still regularly contributes to
the project.
2) Chris Langton has resigned from the board of directors in
order to devote more time to his new projects. We thank him
for all his efforts over the years and owe him a great deal
for having the energy and the will power to get an effort
like this off the ground.
3) We have 2 new board members: Drs. Jim Anderson, of the
Univ. of Washington, and Paul Box, of Utah State Univ. Both
Paul and Jim have supported and used Swarm for a number of
years and brings alot of enthusiasm and experience to our
board.
4) Several orphaned tasks were taken up by several of the board
members:
o Paul Johnson is heading up membership issues in addition to
his continued maintenance of the FAQ, participation in
development, and support on the mailing lists,
o Steve Railsback is heading up the hunt for further funding,
o Jim Anderson is providing us resources to host the Swarm
website and email lists,
o Alex Lancaster is maintaining the website, mailing lists,
and helping to manage the development via Savannah,
o Roger Burkhart is heading up the lion's share of community
outreach,
o Marcus Daniels is helping to manage development at Savannah
as well as kicking in code changes now and then,
o Randy Burge is our registered agent in New Mexico,
4) In addition to board members taking on these tasks, several
others are contributing in essential ways:
o Christine Muongchanh (in Jim's group at UW) is helping with
book keeping and finances,
o Bill Northcott, Alex Perrone and several others are
spending a considerable amount of time porting Swarm to Mac
OS X,
o Greg Madey has stepped up to host SwarmFest'03 at Notre
Dame!.
I apologize if if I've left anyone out.
II. Plans for further funding.
As mentioned above, we are looking for further financial support
from institutions and grants. We now have a Statement of Work
that we are using to tell potential funding agencies what we
intend to accomplish. The highlights of that SOW are:
1) A bit of background on Swarm and the SDG
2) The mission of the SDG is:
o Develop and promote standardized ABS concepts and
frameworks.
o Develop and support ABS software.
o Provide forums for the global community of ABS modelers to
interact.
o Provide training and expertise in the use of ABS to develop
theoretical understanding of complex systems.
o Provide training and expertise in ABS software.
o Promote and support software frameworks for specific
scientific fields.
3) Primary goals and objectives in support of our mission:
o Promote standardized modeling concepts and frameworks for
ABS. We will produce peer-reviewed publications, conference
presentations, and training materials addressing how common
terminology and modeling concepts can make complexity
research easier to conduct and communicate.
o Complete and distribute version 2.2 of the Swarm software.
o Continue providing user support for Swarm.
o Begin development of next generation of ABS software.
o Integrate with other ABS software projects.
o Continue providing such ABS forums as our annual
conferences, email lists, web site, and bibliographic data
base.
o Develop instructional materials on the use of ABS in
research and applied science.
o Develop instructional materials and documentation for ABS
software.
1) Develop guidance on what software tools are useful for
various kinds of projectsSwarm is not always the right
tool.
2) Develop a general introduction to Swarm that makes it
easy to get started.
3) Improve Swarms reference manual by providing more detail
and examples.
4) Create a series of well-documented example codes. In
addition to making these materials freely available, we
will prepare them for use in low-cost training classes.
o Support user communities, specialized software, and
modeling approaches for specific scientific fields.
III. We have 35 members
Our official membership count is 35. These people are the
people we have to thank for the continued presence and
development of Swarm. Please consider joining, officially, so
that we can get this ball rolling by itself.
At present, our membership dues schedule is a bit confused.
Technically, we are a charitable foundation. So, any money that
comes through the door is considered a donation. That means
that it doesn't matter whether someone donates $5 or $500. But,
we are trying to incentivize joining as an official member. In
order to do that, we need to demonstrate unambiguous benefit to
becoming a member. Rather than do this by marketing buzz, we
intend to do this through real contributions to free software
and the successful study of complex systems via Agent-Based
Modeling. It is difficult to make this effort concrete. This
is one of many issues we are working to resolve.
It is possible that, in the future, we will attempt to provide
services for our members that non-members do not have access to,
over and above free proceedings and discounts at the
conferences. But, there could be legal consequences to doing
that, like forcing us to split our book keeping into two funds,
non-taxable and taxable. This type of thing adds more overhead
in terms of volunteer time and professional fees to lawyers
and/or accountants.
For the present, however, we are simply offering the opportunity
to contribute to ABM free software and a spot on our member
pages:
http://www.ku.edu/~pauljohn/sdg/member_pages/
Also, because we are all-volunteer, we grant membership to those
who make "in-kind" contributions, as well as financial
contributions. And in many ways, these contributions are far
more important than monetary ones. If you would like to
contribute time and effort, simply go to the Savannah site (see
below) and sign up for some work. Contributions are not limited
to programming, either. We need work done on documentation,
advocacy, budgeting, project management, release management,
etc.
IV. SwarmFest '03 will be when and where
SwarmFest is at the University of Notre Dame this year. It is
sponsored by the Department of Computer Science & Engineering.
All the info will be available from the SwarmFest '03 website:
http://www.nd.edu/~swarm03/
Thanks to Greg Madey for making these arrangements.
V. Savannah is proceeding nicely
All project management activities are now handled through
Savannah: <http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/swarm>. Although
it has been tough to transition from a funded organization to an
all volunteer organization, we expect to see a rise in momentum
and activity as time goes by.
The primary project is the MacOS X port. We have this status
report from Bill.
****************************************************
Swarm MacOS X port status 27 Dec 2002
If someone could find some time, it should now be possible to do an
X-Windows build of Swarm Libraries on MacOS X. Apple have done a lot
of work to make the latest (10.2.3) versions of MacOS X much more
compatable with standard UNIX software. The system compiler is now
gcc3.1 and gcc3.3 can be obtained and built from Apple's OpenSource
cvs without difficulty. Many more GNU utilities and man pages are in
the standard build.
All prerequisite packages are now available as binaries or can easily
be compiled. Xfree86 4.2 is available as a binary package and can be
used with a number of window managers of which the best would seem to
be OroborosX. Tkl/Tk 8.4.1 and HDF 1.5.42 will build from source
without modification as MacOS X dylibs. BLT 2.4z will build and run
with minor modifications to the autoconf files. Aqua (native display
server) versions of Tcl/Tk are now fairly solid, but BLT makes many
calls to X-windows APIs which will make a full Aqua version difficult.
Current Swarm CVS code can be configured on MacOS X with small patches
to autoconf/automake files. These should soon be updated to the CVS.
Currently my attempts to compile this code fail in avcall. However
Alex Perrone reports that he has succeeded in making a static build
against older versions of Tcl/Tk/BLT and that this build will run the
simplest non-gui Swarm demos.
Once this initial X-windows build is usable, there remain some
significant issues to addresss. MacOS X should be the perfect Swarm
platform. It is a direct descendant of the Next systems on which much
of the original Swarm work was done, and like Next it is an
Objective-C based system. There is an excellent free IDE, a very good
Java implementation and the system compiler is gcc3.1. Unfortunately
the fact it is Objective-C based is the bigest problem. Swarm uses a
modified version of the GNU Objective-C runtime, while Apple has a
quite different runtime using a different C API. This means that
there is no simple way for Swarm code to call Apple APIs or vice
versa. There seems to be some promise in an approach using Apple's
NSConnection and NSProxy classes. This might be made easier if Swarm
was merged with the current GNUstep Foundation code which is once more
under active development. This would seem to be an interesting
project for a keen programmer. If this problem could be solved then
Apple's Cocoa APIs could easily be used to build masses of extra
functionality into Swarm based applications.
Bill Northcott
VI. Website is moved (thanks to CBR and Alex)
Our website is now hosted entirely by the Columbia Basin
Research (CBR) group at the University of Washington. Also,
some of our mailing lists have been moved over, though
Swarm-[Support, Modelling, and GIS] are still at the SFI.
Thanks to everyone who helped make this happen including but not
limited to Jim Anderson, George Kremlicka, Susannah Iltis, Alex
Lancaster and Marcus Daniels.
VII. publications bibliography (new?)
Thanks to Paul Johnson, we have an online bibliographic database
at:
http://raven.cc.ku.edu/~pauljohn/sdg/biblio/
If you know of any papers that reference Swarm, please enter
them into this database.
Here are some 2002 publications that we've found:
Johnson, Paul E. 2002. Agent-based modeling: What I learned from the
Artificial Stock Market. Social Science Computer Review. 20: 174-186.
Bagni, R.; Berchi R.; and Cariello, P. 2002. A comparison of
simulation models applied to epidemics. Journal of Artificial
Societies and Social Simulation. 5: . URL:
http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/5/3/5.html.
Marshall, James A R. 2002. An Investigation into Kin Selection and
Reciprocal Cooperation in a Viscous Population. De Montfort
University, The Gateway, Leicester LE1 9BH, UK. URL:
http://www.mk.dmu.ac.uk/~jmarshall/Marshall2002.ps.gz.
Railsback, Steven F.; Harvey, Bret C. 2002. Analysis of habitat
selection rules using an individual-based model. Ecology. 83:
1817-1830.
Railsback, Steven F.; Harvey, Bret C.; Lamberson, Roland H.; Lee,
Derek E.; Claasen, Nathan J.; Yoshihara, Shuzo. 2002. Population-level
analysis and validation of an individual-based cutthroat trout
model. Natural Resource Modeling. 15: 83-110.
Brichoux, David; Johnson, Paul E. 2002. The Power of Commitment in
Cooperative Social Action. JASSS vol. 5,
no. 3. <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/5/3/1.html>.
Bissey, Marie-Edith; Ortona, Guido. 2002. The Integration of Defectors
in a Cooperative Setting. JASSS vol. 5, no. 2
<http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/5/2/2.html>
Squazzoni, Flaminio; Boero, Riccardo. 2002. Economic Performance,
Inter-Firm Relations and Local Institutional Engineering in a
Computational Prototype of Industrial Districts. JASSS vol. 5, no. 2
<http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/5/1/1.html>
VIII. financial statements
6:44 AM Swarm Development Group, Inc.
01/03/03 Balance Sheet
Accrual BasisAs of December 31, 2002
Dec 31, 02
ASSETS
Current Assets
Checking/Savings
Checking, Wells Fargo 50.00
First State Bank 1,427.98
Savings, Wells Fargo 4,449.04
Wells Fargo, Seattle 400.00
Total Checking/Savings 6,327.02
Accounts Receivable
Accounts Receivable 2,236.00
Total Accounts Receivable 2,236.00
Other Current Assets
Inventory Asset -40.00
Total Other Current Assets -40.00
Total Current Assets 8,523.02
Fixed Assets
Permanent Equipment 799.04
Total Fixed Assets 799.04
TOTAL ASSETS 9,322.06
LIABILITIES & EQUITY
Liabilities
Current Liabilities
Other Current Liabilities
Company Owes Employees
Glen Ropella 12.72
Randy Burge -468.45
Total Company Owes Employees -455.73
Payroll Liabilities -1,112.36
Total Other Current Liabilities -1,568.09
Total Current Liabilities -1,568.09
Total Liabilities -1,568.09
Equity
Opening Bal Equity 950.11
Retained Earnings 6,643.70
Net Income 3,296.34
Total Equity 10,890.15
TOTAL LIABILITIES & EQUITY 9,322.06
Page 1
6:55 AM Swarm Development Group, Inc.
01/03/03 Net Income Detail
Accrual BasisAs of December 31, 2002
Type Date Original A... Balance
Ordinary Income/Expense
Income
Contributions Income
General Journal 8/5/2002 800.00 800.00
Total Contributions Income 800.00
Membership Dues
Invoice 5/17/2002 400.00 400.00
Invoice 5/17/2002 50.00 450.00
Invoice 7/16/2002 400.00 850.00
Invoice 8/5/2002 400.00 1,250.00
Invoice 8/5/2002 1,200.00 2,450.00
Invoice 8/5/2002 50.00 2,500.00
Invoice 12/12/2002 400.00 2,900.00
Total Membership Dues 2,900.00
Miscellaneous Income
General Journal 8/14/2002 100.00 100.00
Invoice 10/16/2002 1,200.00 1,300.00
Total Miscellaneous Income 1,300.00
Total Income 5,000.00
Gross Profit 5,000.00
Expense
Consumable Equipment
Consumable Software
General Journal 4/15/2002 299.00 299.00
Total Consumable Software 299.00
Total Consumable Equipment 299.00
Office Supplies
General Journal 8/5/2002 249.00 249.00
Total Office Supplies 249.00
Postage and Delivery
General Journal 1/2/2002 10.50 10.50
General Journal 4/15/2002 21.98 32.48
General Journal 5/13/2002 78.76 111.24
General Journal 8/5/2002 0.60 111.84
General Journal 10/18/2002 -3.70 108.14
General Journal 10/18/2002 3.70 111.84
General Journal 10/18/2002 3.70 115.54
Total Postage and Delivery 115.54
Program Expense
Internet Service
Check 1/7/2002 231.73 231.73
Check 3/12/2002 226.00 457.73
Check 4/6/2002 114.00 571.73
Total Internet Service 571.73
Total Program Expense 571.73
Telephone
Check 3/12/2002 470.62 470.62
Total Telephone 470.62
Total Expense 1,705.89
Net Ordinary Income 3,294.11
Other Income/Expense
Other Income
Interest Income
Deposit 8/31/2002 0.42 0.42
Deposit 9/30/2002 0.53 0.95
Deposit 10/31/2002 0.55 1.50
Deposit 11/30/2002 0.73 2.23
Total Interest Income 2.23
Total Other Income 2.23
Net Other Income 2.23
Net Income 3,296.34
Page 1
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