SF Bay Area Cypherpunks (80th Chairborne Regiment)
DATE: Saturday, 2001 July 14 (Bastille Day) TIME: 12:00-6:00 p.m. PDT PLACE: Berkeley, CA in the back yard of Eric Hughes's homeRSVP: Please confirm attendance in advance by email to Eric Hughes <eh@ricochet.net> (Yes, this is atypical.)
Contact Eric Hughes <eh@ricochet.net> for more information about this particular meeting.
Contact Dave Del Torto <ddt@cryptorights.org> for information about SF Bay Area meetings in general.
"This agenda is an open and easily-accessed secret."
As usual, this is an Open Meeting on US Soil, and everyone's invited.
Unlike usual, we ask attendees of this meeting to R.S.V.P. for a number of reasons:
(1) so that Eric can send meeting materials out,
(2) to estimate food, and
(3) to develop an attendee mailing list.
(Please indicate in your response whether you want to be on such a mailing list.)
| 12:00-1:00 p.m. |
Lunch and Snacks | ||||||||||||||||
| 1:00-6:00 p.m. |
Design Session on Digital Cash
| ||||||||||||||||
| 6:00 p.m. onward | Potluck Picnic Dinner |
No unusual meeting announcement like this one should be without a standard cypherpunks disclaimer:
"If you don't like what's planned, you can always go do your own thing, perhaps go to DefCon instead."
The meeting is picnic style. It will be held outside; the weather has been fine. If the sky is overcast, though, it can get a little chilly; please bring a sweater or something in case it gets cold. There will be 48 sq. ft. of magnetic whiteboard mounted on the side of the garage to make a functional meeting area. Please bring a picnic blanket and/or portable seating for yourself. The meeting area is under medium shade; the Sun may be occasionally bothersome [you may want to bring SunBlock, aka "Linux SPF 1K" -ddt :].
Your host, Eric Hughes, will provide the following potluck infrastructure: grill, ice tub, serving table, utensils, cups, plates, bowls, napkins. He will also have drinks from noon onward and have chips and salsa for snacks. The grill will be available from 6:00 p.m. onward.
The design session will be moderated. Because this is a working session and not just a bull session, the expectation is that meeting attendees will have familiarized themselves with the advance meeting material and the methodology. A modest amount of preparation is a mark of respect to the other attendees. Please bring note-taking apparatus with you. There won't be time to say everything that might pop into your head. Also, attendees are encouraged to write down their own use case ideas in anticipation of sharing them at the meeting.
One of the goals of the meeting is to create a skeleton set of use cases for digital cash systems. The use cases will necessarily be incomplete, if only from the brevity of the session. The intention is to create enough of a draft to form the kernel of an open source design document about digital cash. Another goal of the meeting is to allow serendipitous self-formation of a core group to push such a document forward.
This is a design session; not an implementation planning session. While this is not the typical way that design is done (i.e. without a specific project in mind), the idea is that a reference model will be widely useful regardless of the specifics that others might choose to implement. In particular, there are a number of agnosticisms that we will take as bounding the design discussion:
The advance meeting materials will include an outline of some of the obvious systems, actors, and use cases. This will form a basis for the discussion, as well as providing a framework for attendees to capture some of their ideas in advance of the meeting.
Eric's friend and former colleague Allen Holub has an ongoing series on object oriented design that he's been doing for IBM developerWorks. Allen will be at the meeting to act as resident methodology expert, and to moderate or facilitate as needed. Four of the articles have been on use case design:
Allen also recommends Larry's Constantine's book Software for Use (Addison Wesley Longman, 1999, from ACM Press) and the attendant web site www.foruse.com. Eric recommends Advanced Use Case Modeling, Software Systems, by Armour and Miller (Addison Wesley, 2001), which despite its title is a fine introduction to the subject, particularly to its motivations.
Eric has the hypothesis that it is useful to model security failures as "impossible use cases" or "impossible scenarios", that is, undesired behaviors of a system that an implementor strives to make impossible. Allen is still thinking over this one.
Address and directions will be sent with meeting materials once you RSVP.
The site is within easy walking distance of BART.
Remember to R.S.V.P.!
Please bring the following:
Please do not bring illegal fireworks, knitting needles, black berets, or Serge Gainsbourg CD's for celebrating Bastille Day.