The Minciu Sodas laboratory, organizing the design of an

Interactive Multiconverter

Hi! Our laboratory is putting together a team of programmers to develop an interactive multiconverter. If you are interested, please write to me at ms@ms.lt Thanks! Andrius Kulikauskas

Some crazy questions we need help with:

What is a financial model that would make sense for a disparate community of programmers?
What language should we choose for the multiconverter, assuming that it will have to run converters written in a variety of different languages?
What would be a good name for our multiconverter?

More to come! Send answers to ms@ms.lt

The development of an interactive multiconverter is an outgrowth of the development of an import/export standard for sequences, hierarchies and networks of notes and all kinds of information.

We are organizing programmers to:

design converters between our standard and various software tools for organizing thoughts
design an interactive multiconverter that would assist the thinker in making conversions across software tools.

Currently, within user groups, we want to find supporters, encourage the design of converters between our standard and various formats. We might organize petitions of users, with use cases instead of signatures, asking companies to sponsor the specification and design of converters.

We are already working with our members:

TheBrain, which is sponsoring the specification of an algorithm for a converter.
MindJET, which is sponsoring the specification of an algorithm for a converter.
Thoughtstream (for the Palm OS), thoughtstream@egroups.com, Ben Darnell

Two discontinued PIMs have loyal followings with robust use cases:

NetManage ECCO - eccopro@egroups.com, especially Raymond Yee
Lotus Agenda - pimlist@onelist.com, especially Gary Oliver

Heavyweights:

Microsoft Word - outline view
Microsoft Outlook
Lotus Notes

Standards:

XML
HTML
topicmaps.org
UML

We want to organize the design of interactive multiconverters so that our standard is useful and we learn more from how it is used.

We should find an open source code repository, put together a team interested in creating a software (perhaps CORBA-like) that would allow people to add their favorite converters, and would also walk people through the conversion of a web into a tree, for example. Find a way that programmers working on this project could earn compensation.