The Moose call

The other week I was at GOTO Aarhus. This was a great conference. And I got to talk about humane assessment with Moose.

The presentation seemed to have captured some attention: http://martinfowler.com/bliki/gotoAarhus2011.html

I think it's great that a project that was built mostly on the research side of the world can capture industry attention. This shows what can be achieved when innovation is married with long-term engineering effort. And it's not that we did not publish anything in the meantime either -- some more than 200 publications stand witness that science was not neglected.

Even if I was the one presenting, the value of the work comes from many contributors. If we were to count, the effort around Moose totals more than 200 man-years of research and development. Moose has long passed the research prototype state.

The philosophy behind Moose is to reinvent software and data analysis by making it accessible and tailorable. We lived this philosophy in one way or another, but it was never quite explicit. Now we have name for it: humane assessment. This is a new approach in the software engineering arena, and it can have a significant practical impact.

So, here is my call. Invest in Moose. Let's change the status quo.

How?

• Just play with it. Take an afternoon and load your system into Moose, build a browser, play with a visualization. And get back to us with questions, suggestions, documentation or code.
• Take an hour to read through humane-assessment.com. And get back to us.
• Help us reshape the http://moosetechnology.org webpage.
• Just get involved. There is always room for a contribution. You do not have to be a specialist. In fact, given that we aim to invent what does not yet exist, none of us are.