[Gretl-users] gretl: two or three things you could do!

Hello all, I know, everyone in the academic world is busy: there are classes to teach, papers to be written, papers to be refereed, conferences to attend, and so on. I'm subject to all these pressures myself, and I spend just about all of my "spare time" coding gretl. The result is that I'm not able to devote time to various things that, I think, would help us all ("us" being people who think gretl is of value). Here are three things that I think would be helpful, one of which has already been done, and two of which remain to be done. If you feel you could contribute in any of these ways, please do! 1) Writing articles, or putting up websites, that explicate gretl for people who haven't heard of it. This has been done. For example, Tadeusz Kufel has a website that brings gretl to a Polish constituency; Talha Yalta, Ryan J. Smith and J. Wilson Mixon Jr. have published papers that assess gretl; and Lee Adkins has an excellent online guide to econometrics using gretl. 2) A Free/Open-Source Software award for gretl: Why haven't we won a prize yet? The obvious answer is that gretl is a relatively specialized piece of software; it's not something that _most_ desktop users will have a need for, or _most_ sysadmins. But if someone had a a little spare time for research: Who awards such things and how are the nominations assessed? I'm not the one to say this, but it seems to me that -- leaving aside the famous "LAMP stack" of Linux (kernel), Apache (web server), MySQL (database) and PHP (web scripting language) -- gretl is one of the best conceived and most functional open-source projects in existence. Of course, this is not just thanks to me and Jack Lucchetti -- it's also due to the careful bug reports and detailed suggestions submitted by many of you over the years. So, what about it? A little recognition in the open-source community at large would be morale-booster for everyone working on gretl. 3) A gretl conference? We have people with more than a casual interest in gretl in at least half-a-dozen (6) countries. Is there anyone who might be interested in organizing a conference to bring us all together? My thought is that such an event would not simply bring _us_ together, but might also form a focal point that would bring in other _potentially_ interested people. For example, graduate students with computing expertise! The conference agenda could be broader than gretl: it could be, for example, something like "open-source approaches in statistical computing". Any takers? Allin. -- Allin Cottrell Department of Economics Wake Forest University, NC