What Now Madison?

Now that I've moved to Duke University, people often ask me what will become of the Croquet effort at UW-Madison. The short answer is that all of the technical development efforts continue uninterrupted. There is lots of interest in Croquet at Madison and the project enjoys a wonderful momentum there (thanks to the wonderful leadership and support for the project from the CIO's office). During my tenure at UW-Madison, I worked to build a viable Croquet effort there and establish a first rate development team. I hired Howard Stearns over a year ago as technical project manager for UW-Madison's Croquet development efforts. With my departure, he now provides leadership for the entire UW-Madison effort (technical and non-technical). At the time of my departure in late October we were doing three main things in relation to Croquet:

1.   Contributing to the creation of the core open source technology

2.   Developing specific educational applications in partnership with faculty and instructional staff on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus

3.   Creating awareness of the effort and building and organizing an international community of effort

The first two areas will continue uninterrupted at Madison. And while I'm at Duke University, I'll also continue collaborating with the UW team on most of the technical and design efforts. It's the third area of effort that I'll initially concentrate on while at Duke University. Part of this involves setting up a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) corporation for the Croquet Consortium. It is hoped that this will be kind of like apache.org and other open source umbrella organizations. More on that in a future post....