Talk:Introduction to Swarm

Dear people, I came to this site by a link that listed results for a search of knowledge management software. Having been sent around several pages, because apparently the page was moved from one host to another and changed into a wiki-page, it took several minutes to realize, that apparently this "swarm" thing is everything but a knowledge management software. I wonder, why there is no first page understandable entry information about the subject, this whole thing deals with. "swarm wiki, the agent based modeling resource" doesn't tell anybody anything, who is NOT part of the whole thing. I'm a software developer and if I see a page that apparently deals with software I expect to find some information about the SOFTWARE. I declare, that I'm not too familiar with "wikis", but I think that's still legal. As a consequence I searched around for a while to find out, what resources the "modeling software" might need, and how to get it. All I found, was, that the only stable version is 4 years old and not available on CD. I did not find out, how to get access to a current version. Neither did I find out, whether this swarm thing is windows, linux, unix or Mac OS based. Aren't these informations that should be very easily found, given that you obviously try to attract people to participate ? As a consequence, I quit. I did not find my way through all this swarm.fest material and how-to-use-a-wiki-stuff to the very vital information, that I tried to find. have a nice day Axel - GISMan

Well, all the information here is maintained by volunteers (we have no paid staff), and the wiki is freely modifiable, so feel free to help us out with suggesting a new structure. The goal of the SwarmWiki is to both be clearing house for agent-based modelling in general, as well as the Swarm software, which is clearly listed under Swarm software, and the information about which OSes we have binary releases is listed under Swarm: development snapshot. Swarm is open source and runs under Windows, Linux and Mac OSX. If you have any concrete suggestions for how better to layout the site to help new folks find the things you were looking for, we're all ears! Just remember we're all volunteers here! --Alex 01:40, 13 Oct 2004 (EDT)