Interested in the Google Summer of Code

[Blaine Booher]

I just signed up to the developer's list a few days ago (After seeing an XO
live for the first time at SigCSE 2008 in Portland) and would love to work
on the OLPC as a Google Code project.  I look forward to seeing more
information on this.

In the mean time I'm going to continue figuring out how to get Sugar up and
running and get my feet wet with the development platform.

Thanks!
Blaine

2008/3/18 Bobby Powers <bobbypowers at gmail.com>:

> Hi, I'm a master's student at the University of Bergen and I'm interested
> in bringing System Dynamics to the XO.  Before I start, if there is a better
> mailing list for this just let me know (I briefly looked through the other
> ones liked from the Wiki, and this seemed the most appropriate).
> System Dynamics (SD) [1][2] aims to help people understand the world by
> explicitly modeling how pieces of it work and then performing experiments in
> these models.  It is used around the world, frequently in majority world
> countries, in development planning [3], for example.  More formally, its a
> methodology for examining and describing the behavior of complex systems
> with an emphasis on the effects that feedback loops and time delays have.
>  At a basic level you have to specify the mathematical equations for the
> different parts of your system.   The same problems can be solved by writing
> code in a programming language (I had a course taught in Fortran a year
> ago...), but usually in SD the modeling is done using a visual editor where
> you can show causal relationships, stocks and flows graphically.  I
> personally think the biggest short-fallings of the discipline are the
> barriers to entry: the current software is far from intuitive and all the
> major commercial offerings (there are no FLOSS products) [4][5][6] are very
> expensive (educational licenses alone are frequently > $500 USD).
>
> Will Wright studied SD and used ideas from it when designing SimCity [7].
>  So I have several things I would like to work on:  first is a core
> simulator that can transform equations into code (I'm currently working on
> this for my master's thesis, but don't have and funding. eesh): I'm using
> the JIT library from the LLVM project to be able to do this.  Second I want
> to create a Sugar modeling interface that makes it easy and fun to create
> models and explore their results (collaboratively, I hope!), and third I
> want to hook this into Metropolis.  I think it would just be so cool if you
> could click an icon in Metropolis and have the visual model that controls
> the Metropolis world pop up (in the aforementioned editor) and be able not
> only to fiddle with parameters, but change the structure!  If all of this
> goes smoothly and there is more time, I would love to add the ability for
> models to interact with and manipulate geospatial data.
>
>
> I guess I am looking for people's reaction, is this something people like?
>  I'm certainly willing to adapt myself to the collective needs and I wanted
> to get a discussion started before the application deadline.  Oh I guess a
> little more background on me:  I attended RPI in NY, USA for 2 years
> studying computer engineering, but transferred because I wanted to do
> something more applied.  I studied environmental studies (at SUNY ESF) for a
> couple years, and got back into coding through classes on ecological
> modeling and GIS.  I've been pretty heavily coding models, algorithms and
> interfaces for the past 2 years, mainly in C#, ObjC and some Fortran, but
> the past 3 months I've been using C++ for 8 hours a day and Python here and
> there.  I've got a Mac with Linux (both FC8 and openSUSE10.3) and Windows,
> and I've just started over the past few weeks to pick up GTK, although I've
> used Cairo in a project for a couple months.  I've only dabbled with the XO,
> but am really looking forward to developing bundles for it.
>
>
> I'm eager to hear what you think!
> yours,
> Bobby Powers
>
>
> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_dynamics
> [2] http://www.systemdynamics.org/
> [3] http://www.millenniuminstitute.net/
> [4] http://www.vensim.com/
> [5] http://www.powersim.com/
> [6] http://www.iseesystems.com/
> [7] http://www.futuresalon.org/2004/11/will_wright_kic.html
>
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