[Termtools] Towards the "new" Competition

[Johannes Waldmann]

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Dear colleagues,

this is just a pointer to the minutes of the discussion
on preparations for the upcoming Termination Competition:
http://termination-portal.org/wiki/WScT08-Minutes-Competition

The Innsbruck group is working very hard to build a reliable and
flexible infrastructure so that authors of provers and problems
can easily upload (and test, to a certain extent) their programs and
data; and so that the committee can define particulars for
actually running and scoring categories of the competition.
Other features (will) include user-defined queries
on the databases of problems and results (= runs of provers on problems).

As a visible milestone, on June 9th, last year's provers and problems
will be run on the new hardware and software.

I would like to take this opportunity to (a) applaud the Tyroleans for
their ongoing efforts, but also (b) remind ourselves that we all want
the design, implementation and running of the competition to be
an open process. We agreed that the primary channel for discussion
was to be the termtools mailing list (= this list).  Sure, at some
point the Committee will make some decisions, and that's where only
members may vote, but before that, I'd like to see an open exchange
of opinions. And even after the voting it is good to have the discussion
archives available, to see what was the reasoning behind the votes.

I have drafted some "bylaws" for the Competition, see
http://termination-portal.org/wiki/Termination_Competition_Steering_Committee#Proposed_Bylaws
I don't want to start a politics discussion here.
The intention is just to write down what I think we all agreed upon.
Feel free to correct, edit etc. Keep (or make) this simple!
If there is disagreement on some item, then remove it.
If it feels too important, then put it up for voting.

Whatever the bylaws may be, the Host of the Competition cannot be bound
 (in the legal sense) by what the Committee votes.
Ultimately, it's their manpower, and their CPU power, so they decide.
Still, being open can save manpower!
(If someone wants a feature, then you could just say,
here's the source code, go add your feature :-)

Looking forward to June 9th - Johannes.

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