We’re looking for somebody who has expertise in developing network applications for Palms. The initial goal is to pick somebody’s brains over the difficulty of various calendar related projects that OSAF might consider. Please send mail to lisa@osafoundation.org if you’re this person or can recommend somebody who might be willing to have a couple conversations.

We’ve been debating whether we might expect an increase in volunteer contributions to Chandler once we ship 0.6 with potentially usable calendaring, or perhaps once we do 0.7 which is likely to allow more solid parcel development as well improving calendaring. We threw around some examples, then I thought it might be interesting to actually get a longer list of examples and data about them — an ad-hoc survey of when volunteers make significant contributions to Open Source software.

The survey has only two questions, one for OS project maintainers and one for OS project volunteers, but there was a fair bit of commentary from the people I pinged so far, so I put it into a Wiki page. If you’d like to add more projects or volunteer data, add your own section and lines to the appropriate tables, just by editing the Wiki page.

I probably won’t say much about the results because it isn’t very scientific but I thought people might enjoy.

Many of us at OSAF have started trying to use Chandler for basic calendaring needs (we call this dogfooding). One of the first things that we see that makes the experience frustrating is that Chandler is too slow in many basic operations, like creating an event. We want to improve these a lot before we release 0.6.

We have identified 9 use cases that we are most interested in, and a handful of others we are paying some attention to. We are also automatically tracking how we are doing: the Tinderbox system runs these performance tests continuously and reports how we are doing against our targets and how the times change over time as we make changes.

Open Source Software is more than just software that has an Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved license. It’s a whole development style and culture. Karl Fogel is one of the developers of the Subversion project, and has been involved with a number of open source projects. He’s distilled the lessons he’s learned about the development style and culture in the book Producing Open Source Software. This is a really practical book, and deals with many of the day to day issues involved with working in open source projects. In particular, I found the section on Setting the Tone and the chapters on Communications and Managing Volunteers to be especially well done.

In true open source style, you can get the entire book online as well as in hard copy. I grabbed an online copy because I was in a hurry, and because I wanted to write all over it ( have this thing about writing in books). Karl has done a great job, and I’ll definitely be ordering a paper copy so that he’ll get some money for his work. And I’ll be recommending this book to every person who wants to know how to get involved in or run an open source project — it’ll let me save my voice and my fingers.

[I'll put my usual book-review excepts on a post on my personal blog]

Highlights

• Chandler: Milestone 6 released, which is feature complete for 0.6 (Scorecard). 210 bugs targetted for final release.

Design

• Progress: Beginning specs for 0.7 (Free-busy viewing first draft, thoughts on markup bar and table cleanup), images for vision and design docs/presentations
• Plans: More spec work, more ACL, triage and free-busy design work

Application

• Plan : Continue making progress on 0.6 bugs
• Progress : Going toward zero, glide path (fix rate - find rate) continue to be good
• Problems : Unclear how we can declare perf bugs “fixed”, need clearer guidelines

Services and Dev Platform

• Progress: Performance: any user action when a large calendar is loaded is much faster. E.g. switching a view.
• Plans: Work on 64 bugs targetted to 0.6

Build and QA

• Progress: Tinderbox perf info — many improvements (still ongoing)
• Plans: Fix build bugs in 0.6 list.

Cosmo and Scooby

• Progress: Week view now has viewing, saving and deleting events from the server. Cosmo 0.3 begun with some bug fixes.
• Plans: Authentication system, multiple user support work. Navigation between weeks. Minical. Recurrence. Make build system more friendly. Cosmo 0.3 feature development.

IT

• Progress: pushed off Bugzilla enhancement projects. VNC server for remote demo viewing been tested. Installed KVM at ISC.
• Plans:
• Personnel: Hiring junior helpdesk person

Community

• Progress: Educause panel and demo last week showed Chandler subscribing to calendars on Cosmo, RPI and Oracle servers. Chandler branding work progress (chose icon).
• Plans: Refactor OSAF Web site (move some pages to wiki, remove others, or update). Making PyCon presentation proposals by Oct 31.

Our latest Chandler milestone, M6, was released on Oct 19th. This is a significant milestone for us since we are now officially “feature complete” and the bug fixing phase is already underway.

A list of the latest completed features and known bugs can be found in the milestone report card.

Milestone Notes

Last week I was at Educause for a couple days, part of a panel o CalDAV implementors. I demonstrated Chandler, and indirectly Cosmo too, to show the university IT audience that CalDAV is real and gaining adoption. François Perrault of Oracle did the first demo, showing Outlook with Oracle’s connected installed client-side, putting a calendar onto the Oracle server (not using CalDAV). But then he showed Lightning could pull down that calendar and view it using CalDAV, and add/change events.

For my part of the demo, I brought up Chandler (m6) with a calendar that had previously been pulled from a Cosmo (0.2.1) server and explained this. Then I subscribed to François’s calendar on an Oracle server, and it showed up in a different colour. Finally I subscribed to a third calendar on an RPI version of UW Calendar, adding a third set of events displaying along with the first two calendars. Except for a mysterious glitch where subscribing to the Oracle calendar didn’t work the first or second attempt but did work on the third attempt, it all went rather well.

Here’s an update on calendar standards work I’m involved in.

• The CALSIFY WG met at the last IETF for the first time. We found authors to revise the iCalendar suite of standards (RFC2445, 2446 and 2447). We’re meeting in November in Vancouver to discuss progress and open issues on these.
• The CalDAV proposal for standardizing calendar access (personal, group or public calendars) is going very well. We’re very close to a draft we can last-call at the IETF. I’m proud to say that OSAF’s Chandler and Cosmo both do some CalDAV and can test basic interoperability with other clients and servers like Sunbird and Oracle’s server. I’m demoing some of this at Educause next week.
• We’re starting to think about what extra metadata is needed to do public event calendars well — for example, good location information. There’s a technical committee within CalConnect talking about this, including EVDB/Eventful people.
• Another new CalConnect committee is discussing the application (and perhaps in some cases, adaptation) of these standards for use on mobile devices.

Also posted on my personal blog

Cosmo 0.2.1 is ready for download.

0.2.1 is a bugfix release focusing on interoperability with Chandler 0.6.

Find download instructions, documentation, and the list of resolved issues at the Cosmo home page at . See RELEASE-NOTES.txt in the distribution for upgrade notes.

Highlights

• Chandler M6 build (0.6.6) planned for this week — currently 8 bugs remaining. General 0.6 bug list still getting scrubbed.
• Cosmo build 0.2.1 will have Chandler sharing interoperability bug fixes to allow M6 to work and finish.

Design

• Progress: Posted sticky plan overview and description. 0.6 bug filing (markup bar icons, other visual nits)
• Plans: Early spec/design work for 0.7: freebusy, dashboard, detail view. Meeting with David Allen

Applications

• Progress : m6 almost there, bug scrub for 0.6 moving forward
• Plan : Nail m6 (few bugs left) and move onto general 0.6 bugs.
• Problems : m6 to slip 1 day (Wednesday night). Glide path stalled this week. Need to measure how we do on bugs once Feature Complete declared.
• Personnel: open job description for Apps developer

Services and Dev. Platform

• Progress: Proposal from PJE for upgrade reviewed but deferred to 0.7 (users will have to export then import to move their data from 0.6 to 0.7). Performance improvements have made current builds meet some of our 0.6 targets. I18n work completed for 0.6
• Plans: Performance work continues. Bug fixing in recurrence, reminders.
• Personnel: BrianK in office for next week.

Build/QA

• Progress: Updated the functional tests to accomodate for the recent internationalization fixes by bkirsch. Setup environment for the m6 milestone build testing. CATS tests moved into Chandler source tree. Performance data reporting automation.
• Plans: Finish 0.6 bug scrub. Verify resolved bugs. Test M6 milestone.
• Personnel: Open job description for junior QA engineer.

Cosmo/Scooby

• Progress: Several bug fixes checked into Cosmo 0.2.1 (relating to Chandler sharing interop). Scooby: some Safari support investigation. Looked into Zimbra.
• Plans: Finish last 0.2.1 and Chandler M6 blocker. Refactor Cosmo for 0.3 to provide pieces Scooby can use independently. Scooby functional spec writing (Bobby). Handle overlapping events in Scooby week view.

IT

• Progress: Selecting system for office bandwidth management. Set up cheap VPS server to support other non-profit needs. Addressing ongoing office alarm issues. Set up prototype VNC reflectors for desktop sharing infrastructure. Closing more tickets than opening.
• Plans: More RAM for many QA machines and a new Silk test box. Resolve alarm issues. Select bandwidth management solution. Select desktop sharing solution. Post new staff opening. Implement graphing for monitoring.
• Personnel: Will open job description for junior IT.

Community

• Progress: Put together Mellon report.
• Plans: Continue branding and landing-page work. Educause panel next week: demo prep and slide write/review