Minutes of February 20, 2009 ScienceSim Senate

On the call: Andrew Fitz Gibbon, Joel Morrissette, Johan Berntsson, Mic Bowman, Paul Steinberg, Tom Murphy, Wilf Pinfold

Next senate meeting: Feb 27, 2009 in SciSim at Kepler (193, 191, 45), or possibly on Joel's island where we will have inworld sound

Inworld transcript from Keplar:

Communication has been flourishing

• Joel plan's to have sound at blueland00
  • Expected to be available for next week's senate meeting
• Paul was testing broadcasting our senate meeting on http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/live-station-test/ using the mogulus tool
  • I noticed when I tried to use it that he chat window was not readable (too fuzzy)
• Mic stitching in an IRC channel
  • Using Mibit?
  • Idea will be to have a separate channel in each meeting space, so we can support simultaneous meetings
  • There was a heartbeat message from the IRC channel we can suppress
  • A message to the channel doesn’t appear in the chat log, instead we get “All communication will be sent to IRC server”. It would be great to have it echo the message instead

Collaboration with other groups

• IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force)
  • Mic will be attending The IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force)
  • Specifically the MMOX BoF (Massive Multiplayer Online X Birds of a Feather)
  • It is basically focused on looking towards interoperability standards for metaverses (the X standards for things like Second Life, World of Warcraft, or Google Earth), just like in my world where “Computational X” stands for things like Physics, or Biology, or Political Science.
  • Mic expects order of standardization to be identity, assets, and object updates
• IEEE Webcasts and informal parallel educational musings
  • Paul and I are planning on running some informal discussions on weaving parallelism into the computer science curriculum via ScienceSim, simultaneously available via the web an also captured for later viewing.
  • There will also be a more formal one using the ON24 platform. This one depends on some Intel funding.

SuperComputing Portal

• Wilf had a good idea of maintaining a duplicate of the Second Life SuperComputing Portal in ScienceSim
• There is a tool Second Inventory that may help us move (and hopefully position) assets
• We are starting up our conference calls to focus on Science game development and deployment
• I have successfully terraformed the SuperComputing Portal to be ready for meeting room and game deployment
• We still need to get the island in its right place in SciLands

ScienceSim miscellanea

• We currently have to 300 ScienceSim user accounts
• We really need a terms of use documents for new users
  • Use of real names has come up as issue. Words along the lines of “Please register with the name by which you have been known in the scientific world.”
• I created a wordsmith page on the ScienceSim wiki, which I emailed everyone, which we can use for developing written material
  • Immediate good candidates for this are the Intel legal use words, Mic suggested the “terms of use” from openlifegrid, and that George Goodman may also have some
• Last week we talked of a Senate Opensim Software Foundation Committee, and these issues came up again
  • 32 and 64 bit debian repositories
  • Hopeful infrequency of breaks in sim to infrastructure interface, and sim to sim interface
  • need for all servers to do periodic simultaneous upgrade when interface breaks with changes to OpenSim software
  • Does it make sense to support an alternate-universe ScienceSim grid with bleeding edge prospective OpenSim software that Sciensim residents can use to place their servers and test changes before we throw and “upgrade-now” switch?

                                             ... Tom Murphy