The ns-3 steering committee met on March 5, 2013, also with ns-3 developers,
following the annual meeting at Inria.  Thanks to a lot of support from Inria, 
we held the first consortium day on March 4.  The attendance was about 40 
people, many of them already associated with the project, but a few newcomers.  Rosa-Marie Cornus posted these images from the event:

version française : http://www.inria.fr/centre/sophia/actualites/retour-en-images-lancement-consortium-ns-3
english version : http://www.inria.fr/en/centre/sophia/news/back-to-the-day-launch-of-the-ns-3-consortium

We had some discussion about the consortium after the event, at the 
ns-3 developers meeting.  Some comments raised were:

1) it is unclear why an academic should join the consortium? Prestige? 
We discussed one possible incentive being the promotion of members' funded projects; to make European/NSF projects more connected.
2) could consortium join an FP7 project directly? probably not.
3) could consortium join the Google Summer of Code?  There is an
issue with the University of Washington accepting mentor payments on behalf 
of people who are not employees; perhaps something with Inria could be 
arranged.
4) can we clarify the benefit to industry?

On this last point, we had some discussion of how to provide benefits to 
industrial members.  One activity that we discussed was training, and 
perhaps holding a multi-day training session at either Inria or the U.S.  
We discussed how much money to charge for this activity, and agreed to look 
at comparable events for guidelines.  USENIX charges about $700/day for their 
training courses (see, e.g.
https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa12/registration-information).

Commercial simulation companies appear to charge between $600-$800 for two or 
three-day training sessions.

Walid Dabbous and Tom Henderson discussed developing materials for such a 
training event later in the year; the main limiting factor will be to 
contribute the time to prepare and conduct the event.  With uncertain 
attendance numbers, it seems like we will have to prepare for an initial 
event like this at risk.

Another item that we discussed was whether industry might pay for 
maintenance of a Windows-specific version of ns-3.  Presently, we do not 
directly support the native Windows software development toolchain.  We 
discussed whether to create a special release of ns-3 (an unmaintained, 
trial version) to gauge interest, and to announce that we are soliciting 
for funding to continue to regularly maintain it.

Since the meeting, John Abraham kindly volunteered to create a new version 
of ns-3 for Windows Visual Studio and also possibly other toolchains such 
as Qt Creator, since he had experimented with this in the past.  He has made 
a lot of progress, and it seems like we will be able to create this 
special version, with John's help.  We'll try to move this forward in April.

CTTC has agreed to contribute the portion of the Google Summer of Code 
mentor payments ($500) due to Nicola Baldo and Manuel Ricardo to the 
consortium.  

Bucknell has pointed out a few typographical errors and raised some questions 
for clarification on the consortium agreement and membership agreement 
documents, and Inria and UW counsel have been deciding how to handle these.