Present: Matt Kirschenbaum, Amit Kumar, Martin Mueller, Bill Parod, Catherine Plaisant, Steve Ramsay, Stan Ruecker

Scribe: Martin

Report from the interface cell and discussion

Stan reported on a hackfest in Hamilton. They tested Open Laszlo for 'roundtripping' information from and to various programming environments, including Java, JavaSwing. Results of this proof-of-concept test were promising. This may be a tool for side-stepping the choice between web-based and Java Swing applications in some environments

There was some discussions of limitations of Open Laszlo, which is not so good with texts when it works on the Flash side and not so good with other stuff when it works on the DHTML side.

We discussed the promise of visualization routines for solving 'group and sort' problems that are associated with long lists that are likely to be part of any Monk environment. A good interface on its part should meet Aristotle's requirements for a good plot and be 'eusynoptic' or 'easy to take in at one glance'. A particular application of this is to make 'transformation over time' visible in 'collection browsing'.

Stan expressed some concerns about closing offthe Monk I collection prematurely. Martin replied that the list in his draft user manual of April 21 was not intended to be definitive and urged everybody add to or subtract from it. Catherine pointed to the advantages of having a (relatively) stable collection soon so that use cases would be comparable. There seemed general agreement with the position that operations in a large document space were critical to Monk and should be tested early.

We went to and fro on the relationship between use cases and technically defined functionalities. There will be a continuing need and effort to extract broad functionalities from particular use cases.

Report from collaboration cells and discussion

Matt reported on various matters more fully described in the minutes of the Collaboration Cell for April 5. Last week's planned conference call did not happen because of technical problems.

Matt drew attention to Greg Lord's mockup for the Monk web site, which drew very appreciative comments. He divided the responsibilities of his cell into 'external' and 'internal' components.

With regard to the external functions, the Collaboration Cell is tracking a number of neighborly or otherwise relevant project, with an expert for each. These include Zotero (Matt), Tapor (Stefan), ManyEyes (Stan), Yahoo Pipes (John U.) Second Life (Matt, Greg, Joe), and Nines/Collex (TBA)

The Collaboration Cell is using a 'monkproject' tag to flag URLS in delicious and is urging everybody to do the same.

With regard to 'internal' functions, i.e. collaborative functionalities of the Monk evnironment, he defined the role of his cell as being speculative since particular deliverables are not part of Monk I. But if Monk is to be a "2.0 Digital Library," as Matt called it, collaborative potential needs to be built into the infrastructure from the beginning. There appears to be full consensus on this issue. Members of the collaboration cell will be "amplifying" the existing use cases to support collaborative activity.

Data Cell report and discussion

Amit and Bill took the lead in reporting on recent discussions in the data cell. Matt expressed his appreciation that the discussion was being carried in a very transparent fashion on the Monk list for everybody to follow. Amit agreed but also stressed the need for one-on-one telephone conversation. Martin pointed out that there need be no conflict between these modes.

Bill expressed his sense that the major decisions in the data cell need to be taken by the June meeting if the project is to move forward at a good pace.

Recent discussions about the data structure have focused on the word level. Martin wondered what a Monk environment should "know" about sentences and paragraphs. Amit and Steve asked whether users would ever want information of this kind. Catherine thought they did.

Other

There were no formal reports from the User/Uses and Analytics cells, but much of the discussion touched on issues relevant to them. Steve brought up Vannevar Bush and the memory or history built into a system. Either Steve or Matt thought it would be nice if Monk had a feature where a user can "replay an expert user's virtuoso performance."

Martin asked the Super Cell members to read the draft of his "Notes towards a Monk user manual," which is intended to be an evolving document describing within the confines of a single document and in a largely non-technical manner everything that Monk is or does. Thus it becomes important for everybody to state clearly what is in it but should not be and what is not there but should be.