Everything below is subject to change.
Implementation Goals
(by April 27) Major upgrades -- update everything to Ubuntu 14.04 and Sage-6.2. Also upgrade all packages in SMC, including Haproxy, nginx, stunnel, etc.
(by May 4) Streamline doc sync: top priority right now is to clean up sync, and eliminate bugs that show up when network is bad, many users, etc.
- (by May 30) Snapshots:
- more efficient way to browse snapshot history (timeline view)
- browse snapshots of a single file (or directory) only
- (by May 30) User-owned backups
- way to download complete history of a project, i.e,. the underlying bup/git repository with snapshot history.
- way to update offline backup, getting only the changes since last download.
- easy way to download all current files as a zip or tarball (without the snapshots).
- (by June 30) Public content
- Ability to make a read-only view of the project visible publicly on the internet. Only works after the account is at least n days old.
- By default, users will have a "report spammer" button on each page. Proven 'good users' will have button removed. Any valid reported users will be permanently banned.
- Only users with validated .edu accounts will be allowed to publish for starters. Maybe allow gmail.com at some point.
(by June 30) Fix all major issues (none major) that are listed on the github page:
https://github.com/sagemath/cloud/issues- (by July 31) Group/social features:
- Support for mounting directories between projects
- Group management: combine a group of users and projects into a bigger entity:
- a University course -- see feature list below
- a research group: a collection of projects with a theme that connects them, where everybody has access to everybody else's projects
- A feed that shows activity on all projects that users care about, with some ranking. Better notifications about chat messages and activity
Commercial Products
We plan four distinct products of the SMC project: increased quotas, enhanced university course support, license and support to run a private SMC cloud, supported open source BSD-licensed single-user version of SMC (and offline mode).
- PRODUCT: Increase the quota for a specific project (launch by Aug 2014)
- cpu cores
- RAM
- timeout
- disk space
- number of share mounts
- Remarks:
- There will be an option in the UI to change each of the above parameters that some project collabs see (maybe only owners initially).
- Within moments of making a change it goes live and billing starts.
- When the change is turned off, billing stops. When a project is not running it is not billed. (Obviously, we need to add a stop button for projects.)
- There is a maximum amount that the user can pre-spend (e.g., $500 initially).
- At the end of the month, the user is given a link to a Univ of Washington website and asked to pay a certain amount, and register there under the same email as they use with SMC.
- When they pay, SMC receives an email and credits their account for the amount they pay.
- There will also be a limit soon on the number of projects that can be associated with an account (e.g., 10); pay a small monthly to raise this.
PRODUCT: University course support (launch by Aug 2014 in time for Fall 2014 semester)
- Free for the instructor and TA's
- Each student pays $20 in exchange for:
- one standard project (they can upgrade quotas as above), which TA and instructor are automatically collabs on
- student is added as collaborator to a big shared project
- in student's private project they get homework assignments (assigned, collected)
- Instructor's project has all student projects as mounted shares
- Instructor has a student data spreadsheet with student grades, project ids (links), etc.
- Powerful modern tool for designing homework problems that can be automatically graded, with problems shared in a common pool, with ratings, and data about their usage.
- A peer grading system for more advanced courses.
- Tools to make manual grading more fun.
PRODUCT: License to run a private SMC cloud in a research lab, company, supercomputer, etc. (launch a BETA version by July 2014, with caveats about bugs).
- base fee (based on organization size)
- technical support fee
- site visit support: install, run workshop/class
PRODUCT: Free BSD-licensed single-user account version of SMC (launch by December 2014)
- a different way to do LaTeX editing, manage a group of IPython notebooks, use Sage worksheets, etc.
- be included with Sage.
- be included in many Linux distros
- the doc synchronization code,
local_hub, CoffeeScript client, terminal. - mostly Node.js application (with a little Python for Sage/IPython).
- ability to sync with a cloud-hosted SMC project.
- sell pre-configured (or just support) for a user to install standalone-SMC on some cloud host such as EC2 or Digital Ocean
