|
2000 Annual Report
It has been a year since the Swarm Development Group was spun-out of the Santa Fe Institute. It has been anything but boring, and I think it is safe to say we have all learned a lot. Since before the middle of last year, Irene Lee led the charge to establish the Swarm Development Group as a non-profit corporation. By the time of our formal departure from SFI, this status was secured, the SDG directors board was formed, and we had an agreement with SFI to transfer copyright of the software. By the end of the year, we had office space allocated, and new computer equipment was up and running. Without taking a breath, Irene went on to organize the first non-SFI-supported SwarmFest. Although things looked pretty grim for SwarmFest 2000 for a few days, Irene persevered and in the end the meeting turned out great. Our friends from Utah State were terrific hosts and the content and attendance was more than we had hoped. To do all this work, Irene burned the candle at both ends. The SDG had no money to pay her, and eventually she just had to stop for the sake of her sanity. Irene's departure was a major loss for the Swarm Development Group. As a stop-gap measure, Chris Langton stepped-in as president until we could find a replacement. In a few weeks, we (the SDG directors) selected Randy Burge to replace Irene. Randy is an expert in tech-transfer, working for Lockheed Martin's Technology Ventures Corporation and Los Alamos National Labs, among others. Just about the time Randy came on-board, a major anthropology grant Chris was awaiting came-through, and with more money than expected. Chris needed to direct all his attention to scientific work. (Chris, in his irrepressible style, is taking his usual first principles approach to the task. Construction, deconstruction, tools & techniques, and even science itself all merge into a intermingled, yet seemingly-effortless vibe. It is *really* annoying..eh, I mean, neat!) Meanwhile, Alex Lancaster and Glen Ropella have continued (and continue) to donate their time and money to the Swarm cause. Alex left SFI this summer to begin study in the Integrative Biology department at Berkeley. Alex remains an active SDG director and helps to keep our web pages up-to-date. Since April, Glen, the Vice President of the Swarm Development Group, and my predecessor at SFI, has been working remote for a Silicon Valley dot com. Glen shares office space with the SDG, and he periodically sells his blood to raise money for rent, disk drives, DSL connections, and the like. Roger Burkhart, the primary designer of Swarm, continues to provide an unending array of deep design plans. It was a travesty his presentation at SwarmFest 2000 was not captured on digital media, seeing how many SwarmFest attendees remarked how they would watch it again and again in a trance of hypnotic fascination. In particular, this observer remains shaken by the reality of watching over his shoulder as he wrote the slides during presentations earlier that day. Paul Johnson tirelessly interprets and recodes our (eh, especially my), various mutterings for the benefit of the Swarm community at large. Paul's contribution to Swarm and agent-based modeling can't be overestimated. As for me, the only SDG employee, through sheer necessity I've taken on the role of executive director of the SDG (even though I'm really just the head geek). Mail your complaints, administrativa and CD-ROM requests to me! More e-mail! More e-mail! |
2000 Annual Report