To help focus as a team, we have consolidated our various mailing lists in the following ways:

1. Chandler-dev is now the working list for all things pertaining to the Chandler Project. This includes planning, design and bug prioritization for both Chandler Desktop and Chandler Hub as well as general interest topics like the project wiki, evangelism, community, and governance.

2. Cosmo-dev remains a separate list for those interested in just the server. Planning and project management discussions that used to happen on Cosmo-dev will move to Chandler-dev.

3. General, Design and Service-dev are now inactive. These conversations will move to Chandler-dev. If you are on one of these lists and want to continue following the day to day work of the project, subscribe to Chandler-dev.

4. Chandler-users will remain the best place for users to ask questions and report issues. Email us at chandler-users at osafoundation dot org.

5. Announce will continue to broadcast major releases and other newsworthy information.

All other public lists will stay the same.

We are also maintaining a Chandler Project collection where you can keep up with more day-to-day work. This is where we’re keeping track of feature ideas, upcoming blog posts and meetings.

View-only URL: https://hub.chandlerproject.org/pim/collection/f9fe3636-c489-11dc-dba3-f100459c9336?ticket=37960wr571

Finally, we will be making more use of the blog to discuss design direction, product strategy and to keep everyone abreast of project status and new releases.

With so many changes around the restructuring we thought it would be helpful to start blogging about our project status on a regular basis so people get a sense of the ongoing activities.

While we work the strategic next steps, our new team will focus on getting a release out for both the desktop and server.

• Chandler Desktop 0.7.4 will be released in the next week or so. Some highlights…

  • We have addressed a number of sharing and recurrence bugs found through usage.
  • We have added a new German localization.
  • The recorded scripts branch was integrated, which is more of a development item.

• Cosmo Server 0.12 will also be released this week. We fixed a few bugs found during hub usage and addressed a number of security bugs.

A more detailed summary will be sent out with each release announcement.

Over the next several weeks, we will be spending most of our time working out the details of our long term roadmap and goals. Our smaller team will be coming together for an off-site at the end of January where we will engage in a number of sessions around planning, strategy and marketing. We have been using a shared collection in Chandler to collaborate on a number of different projects and have published a public Chandler Project collection so others can track our progress.

We continue to work closely with our current users and are in the process of scheduling a number of detailed user interviews which will help us refine our marketing message and provide us with more detailed information about usability patterns. We are currently actively working on addressing a number of security and usability issues. We are also looking for ways to reach out to more users and are investigating projects such as building a Thunderbird plug-in which was posted on the blog and the design list recently.

Finally, as with any reorg there is a period of knowledge transfer and redistributing responsibilities such as builds, systems support and testing. We are also taking care of a number of administrative type tasks and logistics such as consolidating some of our mailing lists, meetings and revisiting a number of processes to make more effective use of the smaller team. We now have short daily scrum-style checkins.

Katie’s post OSAF 2.0 Team seems like a good opportunity to introduce myself in this space. When I first joined OSAF I was asked to do this by Pieter Hartsook but a combination of a bad memory and busy schedule has kept this task triaged Later.

I’m originally from a small town about 45 minutes outside of Portland, Maine. My first brush with software development came during the summer of 2006 when, alongside a 6 day-a-week summer camp job, I participated in Google’s inaugural Summer of Code program. My project for the summer found me working with the GNOME Project implementing an experimental “panel extension” system.

I found Chandler while looking for a Linux calendaring client during my senior year at Williams College and after an internship on the Desktop team working on a project to better integrate the Twisted IMAP server into Chandler I was hired full-time as a server/ web front-end developer.

Most of my work since then has straddled HTTP, working mostly at the protocol level on the server and client side, with occasional forays down into the depths of our database layer and up to the shallow waters of user interface implementation. Most recently I’ve been updating our JavaScript code to use the 1.0 release of the Dojo toolkit.

A second project I’ve worked on recently (alluded to in the title of this post) is the first of what I hope to be a series of interesting hacks designed to expand Chandler into the maze of nooks and crannies that is contemporary personal information management. One of the more important lessons I’ve learned while working in this space is that everyone has a different system for tracking and managing the various things they want to accomplish both in work and in life. While semi-standard systems like Chandler’s Triage Workflow and David Allen’s GTD can help, even the most hard-core practitioners will make adjustments to work with their own personal circumstances. As developers of software designed to “serve the way people actually work, independently and together“, I believe it is our job to lead the way in bringing our ecosystem to people’s real needs.

So without further ado, let me introduce chandler.el, a module for interacting with Chandler Server using Emacs, a popular text editing environment. Instructions for installing and using it can be found at the link above. The current implementation is decidedly rough, but is ready for some real world use and feedback.

This offering is definitely on the techie side, but I hope it serves as a proof of concept for a general class of lightweight applications that have the potential to bring Chandler to the system you currently use to track your life. There is currently a discussion on chandler-users@osafoundation.org in which I’ve solicited ideas for more applications like this, please feel free to chime in there or in the comments to this post with yours!

In the future, updates about chandler.el will be posted mainly on my personal blog occident.us alongside information about whatever I happen to be working on or thinking about at the time. If you’re interested in what I do, do check out that space.

Several folks have asked who is staying on for the next phase — who is remaining on the staff.

Mimi Yin continues on as our Product Designer, Sheila Mooney in Program and Product Management, and Jared Rhine running the Hub Service. Jared will add more IT responsibilities, as well as build and release responsibilities to his plate. Mimi, Jared and Sheila will also be helping me with a wide variety of tasks for the organization, as one might expect on a small team.

Grant Baillie, Jeffrey Harris, Brian Kirsch, Randy Letness and Travis Vachon are all developers on the new staff. Phillip Eby continues to have a contracting relationship with OSAF, and is actively participating in strategy discussions with the team. Grant, Jeffrey and Brian had recently been working on the desktop team, Randy and Travis on the server team. Travis was an intern on the desktop team a few summers back, and Brian worked on the server team a few years ago. Going forward, developers will move around and tackle code on either code base depending on what is needed.

For the time being we’ll have a flat organization, and think of ourselves as one team. (Previously we were organized in server, desktop, qa, product, build/release and management teams). We’ve ended all of our older recurring meetings, and now have one daily sync up with the 10 people noted above. We’re currently doing this on the phone while we get our footing, but may eventually transition to IRC.

You should start seeing more posts on this blog about strategy and overall direction. We’re also starting to getting back into the groove of working on the lists.

I’d also like to emphasize that Chandler Project is bigger than these 10 staff members. Several former staff members intend to remain involved in the project. Andi Vajda will continue to maintain PyLucene and PyICU. Heikki Toivonen and Philippe Bossut will continue with Finnish and French translations. Heikki will continue to maintain M2Crypto. I continue to appreciate the counsel of Phillipe and Ted Leung, and am looking to find ways for them to be involved in an advisory capacity. Others have mentioned wanting to remain involved as well — I’m sure new roles will unfold as the next phase shakes out. Chandler Project also includes contributors like Andre Mueninghoff and Davor Cubranic, who helped immensely in getting out our Preview release. We also really appreciate all the users who speak up on the chandler-users list. We look forward to the project growing, even with a smaller paid staff.

Mimi and Katie talked in ealier posts about expanding the Chandler Universe by developing a Plug-in for Thunderbird.

The plug-in would allow Thunderbird users to interface directly with the Chandler Hub.

Some of the current ideas on what actions the Thunderbird Plug-In would perform are:

1. Sync messages in IMAP Drafts/Sent folders with Chandler Drafts/Sent messages.
2. Stamp a message and add it to a list of collection(s)
3. Assign Triage status to message items
4. Map individual IMAP folders to collections
5. Receive notifications from Hub Service when: a. New / Edited items in a collection b. Items tickled to NOW

What features would others like to see?

Is the idea of a plug-in to Thunderbird useful to the Chandler User base? Will a plug-in help attract new users?

If you have any suggestions for features that you would like to see implemented in a Thunderbird plug-in now is the perfect time to share them.

We’re working on solidifying our plan over the next few weeks. In the meantime, I find it helpful to think in terms of the following analogy:

OSAF is a ship approaching harbor.

We know where in the harbor we want to dock, it’s called Small Workgroup Collaboration. We have a growing number of users today. We need to build on that to get to the dock.

But there is a difficult reef to negotiate in order to get to the dock.

We can only cross that reef in a little dingy, which necessarily means fewer people and a clear, singular focus.

So, what’s the reef?

Caveat: What I have here is not meant to be ‘official OSAF thinking’ or the ‘final plan’. This is simply my best articulation of where we’re at, at this point in time. I’m expecting that the real plan will emerge over the next few weeks.

Extend Chandler to reach into places where there are already users. Some ideas we’ve discussed include:

• Thunderbird plug-in
• SMS to/from mobile devices
• Facebook app
• iGoogle widget

Improve our marketing messaging. This includes things like:

• Converge on a crisp articulation of Chandler’s core offering. In particular, who is Chandler intended for, what problems does it solve and how does it solve them? More specifically, we need to answer the question from the ‘Chandler as a Managed Workspace’ design list thread:

Why is what we have already good enough for some people such that they have Chandler open all the time and use it as a source of truth? Why do they use it even though I know everyone has a long wish list of features they’d really, really like to have?

• Revamp the landing page,
• Pull together a demo build around real Chandler usage scenarios,
• Post more regularly to this blog to improve transparency into our planning and product decision making process,
• Reach out to build a community around evangelizing Chandler.

Improve usability so that we don’t lose users who are interested in Chandler but get stuck trying to do basic set-up tasks. This includes:

• Smooth out the sign-up process, in particular, setting up the Desktop to sync with the Hub Service,
• Round out basic import/export, share and subscribe functionality in the web app,
• Improve initial split-second visual impressions of both web and desktop apps,
• Implement multi-select to delete/triage/drag and drop multiple items at a time,
• Allow users to re-order collections in the sidebar.

Solidify our offering so that people stick with the product and pass it on to others, aka Remove roadbloacks to people seeing and experiencing Chandler’s core offering.

• Fix pop-to-NOW bugs that are obscuring collaboration workflows and usage scenarios,
• Display the # of unread items for shared collection in sidebar,
• Separate Detail View,
• Finish Month View,
• Print,
• Ways to sub-section the LATER section,
• Reference / Resource / Document Kind for managing reference notes and materials.

Solidify our offering so that we attract a development community.

Lifehacker: Previewing Chandler, The PIM for the People

A month back, we were mentioned on the lifehacker blog as “the PIM for the People”.

What have we done to deserve such a title? Gina Trapani, the blog editor picked out this phrase from our vision statement:

“Our goal is to serve the way people actually work, independently and together, particularly in small groups, a market segment we believe is underserved. Our belief is that personal and collaborative information work is by nature iterative and that the existing binary Done/Not-Done, Read/Unread, Flagged/Unflagged paradigm in productivity software poorly accommodates the reality of how people work.”

I’m glad that this resonated with her. It’s something we should certainly build on and refine.

On the other hand, she also said: “As for the preview release, well, it has some ways to go” and “it’s not stable software ready for primetime”. She cited inability to sync completely with Gmail as her personal blocker. (She’s not the first to have this reaction.)

We’re certainly taking these kinds of concerns seriously. We’ve found that most people who show up on the users list and are using Chandler for tasks and calendaring find the desktop sufficiently stable to meet their needs. However, if you’re running on an older machine (e.g. PPC Mac) or if you’re hoping to get all your email into Chandler, the app might feel unstable.

But she did follow up with: “…the Chandler preview IS an exciting tease at a unified inbox/calendar/task list that keeps all your stuff in one place while offering decentralized sharing capabilities.”

She also sees us as potentially “delivering users from the evil of Microsoft Outlook and Exchange server”.

The lifehacker post illustrates both what’s best and worst about our efforts thus far to communicate to a wider audience about what we are and what we hope to become. Questions we need to answer in the coming months include:

1. Is it really a given that people won’t use Chandler until it replaces their email client? The response to What is Chandler supposed to be for, anyway? shows signs that with the right messaging and relatively lightweight feature improvements, we could convince people to use Chandler as an add-on to their existing email client.

2. There is something appealing about Chandler as an open source project and Chandler as an attempt to up-end existing information management paradigms. It would be interesting to better understand: What in the product itself gives people a sense that we’re living up to our promise? Or is it just our verbiage that’s convincing?

3. What about Chandler as Outlook/Exchange killer? Do we need to have that to keep people interested? We try to repudiate it wherever we can, but it’s a label that’s stuck. How do we set expectations correctly without presenting it as a lack, deficiency?

OSAF and the Chandler project are going through some big transitions. Yesterday, January 7, we restructured the organization. This is the biggest change since the inception of project six and a half years ago.

In September 2007 we delivered a Preview release of Chandler Desktop, Chandler Server and the Chandler Hub web application. Since then we’ve been gradually acquiring users and building a community of people interested in the project. We now have hundreds of people participating in our users mailing list and thousands of users downloading Chandler and creating accounts on Chandler Hub.

Chandler is an open source, standards-based calendar and task manager built around small group collaboration and a core set of information management workflows modeled on Inbox usage patterns. Users manage and share calendars, tasks, messages, and notes with the Chandler Desktop application and with the Chandler Hub web application.

The next phase of the project is about growing the user base, building the community, and diversifying our funding sources. OSAF has been primarily funded by one person up to this point, Mitch Kapor. Our goal going forward is to modify our organization and our funding model to grow into a publicly supported community project, not propelled by one individual.

I will be leading the next phase of the project, and Mitch will be winding down his role on the project. Mitch will provide transitional financial assistance to support the organization through 2008. Mitch will step down from the board, and I will replace him.

OSAF will maintain a smaller staff during the next phase of the project. While figuring out the new funding model, it is prudent for the organization to reduce expenses. OSAF’s paid staff will go from 27 people to 10 people. While I expect that most former staff members will move on to other endeavors, we certainly welcome them to remain involved with OSAF and Chandler in some capacity. Developers will retain commit privileges, for example.

Strategically, we find ourselves at a crossroads. The new Chandler team will continue to address the needs of informal groups sharing calendars and managing projects together. We’ve gotten a lot of great feedback from our current users, and intend to use that to fix usability problems and shape the next set of feature work. We have several options before us and will be ironing out a more focused plan for the next phase. We will keep everyone updated on this blog.

The Chandler team did a fantastic job shipping the Preview release. Building on this accomplishment, the project has many great possibilities ahead. While saddened to see such a great team come to an end, I’m excited about the project’s opportunities and looking forward to the next chapter.

The Chandler Project is pleased to announce the 0.11 release of Chandler Server (Cosmo)!

Chandler Server is a server and Ajax web UI for managing and sharing calendars, events, and tasks. It implements open data standards including CalDAV, WebDAV, Atom, and Atompub.

This is a bugfix release for Chandler Server 0.10.1 and is recommended for general usage.

The improvements include better support for account signup and odd usernames, better error messages, and a variety of other fixes.

Chandler Server 0.11 is currently available for download as a ready-to-run bundle at:

http://chandlerproject.org/serverdownload

and the source code is available from subversion at:

http://svn.osafoundation.org/server/cosmo/tags/rel_0.11.0

Send us feedback at the open mailing list:

chandler-users at osafoundation.org

We look forward to hearing from you!

The bugs fixed in this release are:

8481 Invert text and icon color when a row is selected
8498 Add/Delete a collection (not shared)
8770 Easy access to account set up information
9743 Use custom buttons for Task and Triage status column headers
9818 Users should be allowed to leave Title field blank
9844 saving changes taking too long..
9985 cosmo to restrict collections to have one icaluid
10238 During collection switch, “loading” box moves to end of load
10333 Drop :443 from activation email URLs
10374 Dojo Errors Running Windmill Suite
10394 byline overlaps the Remove button with large fonts
10431 Better error message when user clicks on activate account link 2x
10442 Deal with bad data in a sensible way
10493 “Changes in detail view” box pops without outputting any debug info, regardless of cause
10733 Can’t log in to hub — problem with percent char in username?
10759 first load from initial ticket is slow on hub
10764 “Starts on” sorting results in unexpected results
10866 unstamping recurring event as event results in js error
11003 Bring events in the ’selected calendar’ to the foreground
11004 Automatically change sidebar selection to match selected event in the calendar
11097 Stamping a recurring event as mail should always apply to the entire series
11099 Calendar not refreshing when unstamping eventness from a recurring series
11100 Web UI support for BMP unicode characters
11125 Collection dialog elements need unique ID’s
11127 [[Main.Error.EventEditSaveFailed.CollectionLocked]]
11140 If-None-Match doesn’t work with put
11175 : in username causes chaos
11211 Collection overlays, un checking all collections still shows last selected
11267 creating a new collection from the web UI automatically shows overlayed events in the cal canvas
11268 Go to date field squishes into the sidebar
11269 DB consraint violation with TimestampAttribute during DAV PUT
11273 Building Cosmo on Leopard, then running with derby broken
11283 hibernate exception when creating user
11307 OPTIONS request to feed service user URL returns 500
11328 exception thrown when item uid is invalid
11336 Triaging LATER occurrence to DONE doesn’t work first time
11341 Change quick entry hint text to Create a new item.
11350 IE 7 alert errors in VM when interacting with the canvas
11358 DTSTAMP not exported correctly
11373 Reconsider use of synchronous XHR calls
11374 Log CMP signups in detail
11377 make sure validation works for all form elements in detail view
11386 non-standard VTIMEZONE defs not included in event exception .ics
11478 DAV request handler needs to store unexpected exceptions in request attribute
11510 can’t save recurring events (All Occurrences) in list view
11538 stamping note as event doesn’t show up on cal view right away
11541 Deleting the last collection in my account leaves me stuck at “Loading”
11614 Can’t sort list view by date
11653 Add clear “OR” indicator to password recovery page

A summary of known issues in this release is available:

http://chandlerproject.org/knownissues

There was no change to the database schema for Chandler Server in version 0.11. Instructions for upgrading from previous versions of Chandler Server can be found at: <http://chandlerproject.org/Developers/ServerBundleInstallation#Upgrading%20from%20previous%20versions>