Sophie - Retreat Report

Project Name and Start Date:  Sophie  1 July 2004

Project URL: http://sophieproject.org/

Project Goals:

The aim of the Sophie project is to reinvent reading and writing in the
digital era. Sophie Author enables people to create robust, elegant,
networked, rich-media documents without knowledge of programming or the
need to master complicated high-end assembly tools such as Flash.
Sophie is open-source under a BSD license and currently runs on
Macintosh, Windows and Linux.

Participating Institution and Responsible Person:

Sophie is a project of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at The
School of Cinematic Arts at The University of Southern California,
under the direction of Dean Elizabeth Monk Daley.  Sophie is the vision
of Bob Stein, the developer of the original Criterion series and TK3

Milestones and Deliverables:

Sophie was funded in two separate grants from the Mellon Foundation: a second grant became necessary when the project underwent a significant expansion in scope during year 1. The past twelve months have seen substantial progress toward the objectives of both grants, culminating with the release of Sophie Early Release, in March 2007. Sophie Early Release includes all features described in the first grant except the Sophie Reader and key deliverables from the second grant including the Sophie Server, OKI integration and printing. Contingent on additional funding, the schedule for completion of Sophie 1.0 is as follows:

• April - June: carefully document Sophie, as well as stabilize the current feature set, build Sophie Reader
• July - September: complete all 1.0 features and release 1.0 Beta version
• October - December: testing and release of Sophie 1.0

The One Laptop Per Child organization has committed to putting Sophie on the XO machine (aka $100 laptop) Sophie would provide a content-assembly tool that OLPC now lacks. Our hope is to get Sophie running well on that machine by the time of its August launch (on six million machines). 

The expansion in project scope is attributable to some important conceptual advances:

1. About a year into the project we began to conceive of documents not just as a series of pages, but also as canvases with dynamic windows. This may not seem obvious or important now, but we believethat this will help, over time, to resolve the long-standing tension between the strict linearity of pages (inherited from print) and the hyper-textual promise of the networked document.
2. Via the Sophie Server, Sophie documents now stream from the internet, allowing new forms of collaboration on authorship as well as more flexible distribution.
3. Thanks to the Sophie Server, Sophie documents now contain live dynamic text fields such that a comment written in the margin of a Sophie document by one author will be displayed immediately in the same place for anyone else reading that document.

Community

Sophie is just now achieving early release, so a community has not yet formed. Howeve, Sophie has been selected as a Google "summer of code project" (as part of the Squeak community) so we have hopes that a community of early adopters will form this summer. A preliminary website has been built to with basic documentation and mechanisms for downloading the latest version.