MINUTES OF THE ANSA MANAGEMENT BOARD
held on
9th January 1998 at APM, Cambridge
Present: Bill, O'Riordan (Chairman), Andrew Herbert (Chief Architect), Yvonne Peat (Secretary), Chris Mayers (APM/Digitivity), Eric Palmer (APM), Bob Briscoe (BT), Dr Koji Tajima (Fujitsu), Andy Lingard (GEC-M), Ian Davies (GPT), Neil Mason (GPT), Peter Wharton (ICL)
Apologies Dr Matsuo (Fujitsu)
The minutes of the last MB meeting were approved and signed. There were no matters arising and all actions had been completed.
Andrew gave an update on changes in the status of Consortium members. All members are up to date with payments.
The ANSA team visited FJL in Kawasaki and Fujitsu have agreed to move to a standard contract when they renew in June.
They will keep a private contract with APM to cover their secondee and the annual briefing trip to Japan.
A Technical review meeting has been scheduled with BT for the first week of February.
DERA have given notice and will leave the consortium in May 1998. Andrew and Will are currently working to find a new champion to replace John Holmes.
Fujitsu introduced APM to Hitachi during the annual visit to Japan, and Andrew is investigating possibilities of Sponsorship.
Andrew summarised the Technical Board meeting and overall progress against budget.
Deliverables will all be put out on the FTP at the weekend to allow BT to access the information in time for a meeting in the next week.
Eric reported on cost and effort against budget and availability of deliverables against schedule.
The consortium needs to agree to extend the ANSA Phase III Programme into the 1998/9 project year and set the fee. The proposal is to maintain the £45K level of subscription. This was agreed. BT suggested considering a higher fee but all of the other Sponsors had only budgeted for £45K and did not feel they would be able to get this increased.
Andrew explained the provisions in the FollowMe consortium agreement which protect the ANSA IPR being transferred to FollowMe, and importantly, gives the ANSA Sponsors access to FollowMe results.
The Board asked if ANSA Sponsors will get access to the FollowMe Web Site. Andrew undertook to discuss this with the FollowMe consortium. For the time being he is copying documents into the ANSA web site.
ACTION: AJH
6 ANY OTHER BUSINESS
The Chairman said that he would like an offsite meeting amongst the Sponsors to see if there is a better way of going forward, rather than the annual round of sponsors being unsure that they can continue their commitment.
GPT expressed concern that without the momentum of an ongoing project, people won’t come up with money if they are just paying for individual projects. Peter Wharton said that the view within ICL is that ANSA looks too much like a cosy intellectual club and finds it hard to sell the consortium to ICL's fragmented businesses. BT expressed the view that the Board should be considering ways in which to make the consortium more appealing to potential new members.
Andrew felt that there were two issues that needed to be addressed, how do we make ANSA more attractive to a wider audience and how do we avoid a repeat of last year's debacle. He expressed APM's desire to continue doing research of mutual interest with the sponsors .
Andrew reported that he had been a Reviewer for PERDIS project.
Lancaster and INRIA have a project Relationship with Control and Co-ordination of Complex Distributed Systems Project - Andrew is to discuss possibility of giving the FlexiNet code as a base in return for results from the project.
ACTION: AJH
Andrew also requested permission from the MB to release the DIMMA code to the public. It would be for internal use only, no redistribution, with exploitation licences available for 45K, would have to register to download it. This was agreed.
ICL have links with Durham and Southampton and would like to show them some of the ANSA material. Andrew confirmed that ICL have the right to show them various ANSA papers.
Tuesday 31st March and Wednesday 1st April
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