Meeting notes for September 26, 2013 telecon of the ns-3 consortium.

Attendees:  Felipe Perrone, George Riley, Nicola Baldo, Manuel Ricardo (and Rui Campos when Manuel had to leave), and Tom Henderson.

There were no additional agenda items so we proceeded with the proposed agenda.

1) membership

We have officially added two new Executive Members (Ga. Tech, Bucknell) and
one regular consortium member (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory).
Membership dues from LLNL have been deposited into a University of Washington
account.  LLNL is entitled to participate in the annual plenary event.

Felipe Perrone discussed his experience in visiting Comcast recently, and 
providing consortium membership information to them.  

Nicola Baldo mentioned that if everyone had a set of materials (brochure, 
application) readily available, they could perhaps be handed out at 
opportune times.  Tom Henderson took the action item to try to revise what 
has already been prepared for last March's event.

2) Workshop on ns-3

Tom Henderson suggested to make the consortium assume the role of steering
committee for the annual workshop, and holding it with the annual
plenary meeting.  We have discussed holding it in the spring of 2014
in Atlanta GA, with the possible schedule of:

> Mon-Tues:  ns-3 training, and consortium meeting
> Wed:  Workshop
> Thurs-Fri:  Developer discussions and advanced topics

We are tentatively planning to hold this May 5-9 in Atlanta, GA.  George 
Riley is looking into room availability but does not anticipate any problems.

Going forward, Tom will further socialize these potential dates, and we will 
need to find a TPC chair or co-chairs, define the training opportunities, 
and start to publicize.


3) Training workshops and other events

Tom Henderson mentioned the possibility of arranging a tutorial in
November,  and possibly others at later dates, to raise money, and discussed
this.

Manuel had suggested Wireless Days conference in Valencia, Nov 2013.
Also, Nicola has mentioned that CTTC will be hosting the next European
Wireless conference on 14-16 May 2014

We discussed these opportunities further; Tom mentioned that he had 
concluded that we are too close to any potential November 2013 events to 
adequately prepare and publicize.

Nicola mentioned that there are many events in which we can obtain a talk, 
but it is sometimes difficult to arrange in those cases that the revenue 
would flow to the consortium.  He mentioned that this may be the case for 
European Wireless.


4) Project updates
   -- Google Summer of Code, ESA Summer of Code
   -- project technical status and plans
   -- update on Windows port of ns-3 discussed in March

Tom mentioned that the Google summer students had done well, and we had a 
new student for ESA SOCIS coding for the next month or two.

Tom mentioned that a priority of his is to further modularize the ns-3 build 
using the bake build system.  There weren't other suggested high-priority 
items for software development.

Tom mentioned that John Abraham and Brian Swenson are finalizing the Windows 
port, and it should be available within a few weeks.

Tom mentioned that overall we are challenged to find active maintainers, 
to replace those who move on to other things.  Nicola suggested that we 
might look to our very active ns-3-users list and steer some of them 
towards being more developers (helping us solve patches) rather than them 
coming to the list for help and then going away once their problem is 
(privately) solved.

Nicola also observed that the transition from mailing list to bugzilla 
(bug entry) seemed to be a barrier to users.  He recommended also that 
we maintain a collection of small development items that we can point 
people to get started.  Tom mentioned that we had a "Project Ideas" 
wiki page already in this regard, but it perhaps needs more active 
maintenance and advertisement.

5) Financial status and any other admin items

Tom summarized the status of two budgets at the University of Washington.

For fund raising, Nicola suggested again the idea of a "small donations" 
capability (e.g. Paypal).  Tom mentioned that he will be attending Google 
Mentor Summit in October and see what other open source projects are doing 
to raise money these days.

The meeting agreed that early November would be a good time to reconvene with 
another telecon, to plan the proposed May workshop and annual meeting.