Hi everyone on the UCF!
Recently, I realized something.
In March 2019, I learned about a programmer in Japan named Takumako who developed for the fx-5800P. By going through his work, I realized most of what he did, i.e. reverse engineering of the protocol, was already done by a german developer, Simon Lothar, back in the beginning of the 2010s. That event made me realize how much understanding (by reverse engineering or other methods) and programming for CASIO calculators those days feel like building the Babel tower: each of us do and re-do the same things all over again, in its own community, and although there is some documentation gathered all around the Internet, searching and reading all of it is time-consuming and most people don't have the time to actually do it.
Although I guess the vocation of the UCF is to be a global place for everyone, it has become yet another place (and doesn't seem to be that active?) to look into. So the whole “CASIO communities” thing feels like a Babel Tower where most people do research and programming in their communities and the only communications are inter-communities: Critor between Planète Casio and TI-Planet, sentaro21 between cnCalc and Planète Casio, and so on. These bridges end up disappearing and no one is there to replace them.
So what about an international technical committee (not community), with representants from each community? Like a federation where, in order to be part of it, you have to be the representent (elected or not?) of a community in the federation. It would be more direct, and people in it can feel invested with a mission for a limited period (one year? more?).
Of course such an international committee brings a lot of questions:
- Who would be part of it? Who wouldn't?
- What would the criteria be, one person per community or more?
- What communities could be represented in this committee?
- What governance do we want for it?
- Which language(s) shall we use?
- How would we communicate between us? To the rest of the world?
I need your opinion on this. What do you think about it? Have you already experimented such a thing? Can we win from such a project? :-)
(original post on Planète Casio)
