Demo page for cstart.org/projects | General | Forum

I have made some changes to all of these pages – the project listing page and the individual project pages for Project Balloon, Project Rocket, Project CubeSat and Project MannedFlight.  Each project now has what I think is a fairly comprehensive description of its purpose and a fairly sensible Phase Structure (with the exception of CubeSat, whose Phase Structure should be considered quite tentative – I haven't read or thought much about this yet).  There is also some more text on the project listing page explaining the nature of these 4 projets as "foundational projects" and indicating that more ambitious future projects (such as CLLARE) will eventually happen using the building blocks from these projects, and that these future directions will be chosen by the community.

I am very keen to collect feedback from everyone on every aspect of these pages. 

If people are generally feeling that this project structure is a good idea, these pages are a good idea and the information on them is starting to look good enough to make public then we should probably start thinking about naming these projects (which can be done using Reddit and polls, as we did for the motto), designing logos/icons for each (if we agree that is a good idea) and opening these pages up to the public.

What do people think about this being part of a bigger strategy for CSTART where we basically sketch out our immediate future in rough detail (using these pages) and then put a hold on actual engineering to focus on cooperating with Mach 30 on the Open Design Engine (or whatever we want to call it platform), and then "activating" engineering on these projects as the ODE software becomes available?  Since Project Balloon is relatively simple, we could activate it almost as soon as we have a basic ODE beta functioning.  This would provide useful testing of the Beta and help iron out obvious bugs.  Once our confidence in ODE has grown we can then activate Project Rocket (which will be something of a reactivation, since we have so far done good work on OHKLA (which constitutes Phase 1 of Project Rocket), and then the other projects, etc.  This approach would lead to some "downtime" for contributors who could not assist with the design and programming of ODE.  I am not opposed to us coming up with some way to allow these people to contribute in the interim – perhaps by writing tech reports etc., which we could develop a document database to help manage.

As you may have noticed, I made a blog post a few days ago explaining the planned change to the 4 new foundational projects, and the fact that we will be working on the ODE tool to facilitate these projects.  I'd like to make the promised second post explaining the nature of the projects soon, so as to facilitate name voting etc. so that we can make the project landing pages publically visible.  So if anybody has anything they really want to say about the details of the projects, please say it soon!

I've been thinking more about the program/project thing.  I don't know how universal this is, but to me, "program" has connotations of a long-term endeavour, with lots of individual steps, with an uncertain total duration.  The "X Program" sounds like it should have "X 1", "X 2", etc, for as long as it takes us to complete the program's goals.  In contrast "project" sounds to me like more of a one-off, clearly defined effort without subdivisons.  Do other people have this intuitive understanding?  If so, how do we think this applies to our projects/programs/whatever.

On the one hand, the currently proposed 4 projects/programs do have a stage structure, which is inline with the pluralistic interpretation of "program".  On the other hand, I envision them as being efforts to produce the technology to enable other projects/programs which will be even more program like.  E.g. once we have a proven generic CubeSat infrastructure, we might decide to use it to investigate some specific scientific phenomenon, and that could be a long term endeavour that we don't immediately know the duration of – we might have to keep laucnhing ever more advanecd satellites as part of that Program until we finally have all the data we need for our purposes.  Compared to something like, something like "Project Rocket" seems fairly limited in scope.

Perhaps I'm making too big a deal out of this.  What do other people think?

I notice that NASA don't seem particularly consistent in their use of these words.  This page seems to use some definitions whereby "Project Apollo" was a "Program", which I consider somewhat confusing.