From there to here

Henrik Bennetsen
As of writing these words in late July 2009 our project is now about 6 months old. With an emerging public framework including this blog in place it might be good to tell a little about the background of Sirikata.
The project got started when a small group of people came together at Stanford. In the group were people from Computer Science who had spent a few years looking into how to build a better platform for collaborative 3D spaces. The work had lead to a well described architecture as well as a prototype. The other party was from the Stanford Humanities Lab who had done work on a bunch of platforms without ever feeling they found the right one. They now had some new projects emerging and a need for a better platform to build these on.
A collaboration was established around a few basic principles:
We need to grow Sirikata to be fully community run and owned open source project.
The platform technology needs to be open and neutral like the World Wide Web itself.
A major effort during these first 6 months has been to refactor the entire system. This basically meant starting from scratch but with the benefit of having built one prototype as well as reusing code from it when appropriate. We have jokingly called this our ‘walk in the desert’ phase. Nothing much to show except for a strong belief that we were working towards something that matters.
We are now starting to feel that we are getting to a place where we have something of interest. From this blog we will be starting to talk in a more public way as our continued efforts towards becoming better at the distributed thing. We should be able to share some early builds you can check out along with visuals and other signs we are moving forward. So please pop us in your reader and stay tuned!

As of writing these words in late July 2009 our project is now about 6 months old. With an emerging public framework including this blog in place it might be good to tell a little about the background of Sirikata.

The project got started when a small group of people came together at Stanford. In the group were people from Computer Science who had spent a few years looking into how to build a better platform for collaborative 3D spaces. The work had lead to a reasonably well described architecture as well as a prototype. The other party was from the Stanford Humanities Lab who had done work on a bunch of platforms without ever feeling they found the right one. They now had some new projects emerging and a need for a better platform to build these on.

A collaboration was established around a few basic principles:

  • We need to grow Sirikata to be fully community run and owned open source project.
  • The platform technology needs to be open and neutral like the World Wide Web itself.

A major effort during these first 6 months has been to refactor the entire system. This basically meant starting from scratch but with the benefit of having built one prototype as well as reusing code from it when appropriate. We have jokingly called this our ‘walk in the desert’ phase: Nothing much to show except for a strong belief that we were working towards something that matters.

We are now starting to feel that we are getting to a place where we have something of interest. From this blog we will be starting to talk in a more public way as part of our continued efforts towards becoming better at the distributed thing. We should be able to soon share some early builds for you to check out along with visuals and other signs we are moving forward. So please pop us in your reader and stay tuned!


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