While Chandler was originally conceived as a general purpose personal information management tool, we realized early on that sharing and collaboration, particularly small-group collaboration needed to be integral to any effective personal information manager.

It’s an exciting time to be in this area of software development. Software companies are finally turning their attention to small organizations, businesses and households; groups that are less structured than traditional corporate environments.

Chandler falls into this new category of personal and collaboration tools for small, loosely structured workgroups. There are 2 significant ways in which Chandler departs from enterprise-scale collaboration tools:

One. Traditionally, many collaboration tools have been structured around “clients” and projects, which were presumed to have start and end dates and concrete deliverables, that once delivered meant the project was complete. Delivering for each client was assumed to be a relatively “straightforward, process-oriented” affair that could be mapped out in “workflows” that remained constant from one project to the next.

By contrast, Chandler assumes that new projects (or tasks) will continuously emerge from existing projects. Old projects change or become irrelevant before they’re even begun. As a result, “work” becomes a never-ending, ever-changing procession directed towards a higher-level goal. To be sure, deadlines and milestones exist along the way. But they are markers in a continuous progression as opposed to tidy endings to bounded projects.

In short, Chandler is designed for groups that are constantly re-inventing what it is they do and how they do it.

As a result, building and maintaining project and workflow structures for managing and organizing such a constantly changing morass of tasks, dates and unresolved issues just doesn’t seem worth it.

Instead, Chandler is intended for users who are actively looking for something that lets you stay “organized” at their own pace. They specifically don’t want to feel like they’re being pressured to set deadlines they’re not ready to set. They don’t want to be harassed about tasks you entered but no longer need to do. In other words, Chandler users want a “Don’t call me, I’ll call you.” kind of tool.

Two. Traditionally, collaboration tools have focused on coordinating hand-off of information and shared resources (documents, media, etc) so that each member of the team has access to what they need in order to focus on their work.

By contrast, Chandler assumes that ownership of responsibilities is shared and passed from one member of the team to another with relative fluidity.

As a result, Chandler sharing isn’t modeled as a fileshare that gives everyone access to everyone else’s work. Instead, Chandler collaboration assumes that people need help working on the same thing together.

Sharing in Chandler is less about “watching” other people’s task lists and calendars and more about sharing a group collection and calendar where individual tasks are passed around or simply worked on in parallel by multiple people.

This doesn’t mean that “personal” collections can’t and shouldn’t be shared with others. It’s more a matter of “What is Chandler’s special sauce?” when it comes to collaboration.

This fluidy in collaboration also explains why Chandler is first and foremost a personal tool with built-in collaboration as opposed to straight-on groupware.

Our belief is that the line between “my work” and “your work” and “our work” is now sufficiently blurred such that tools that draw a hard line between personal and group task management simply erect unecessary hindrances that break common workflows.

Note: This is yet another way in which Chandler aspires to mimic email. People see email first and foremost as a personal tool. But fundamentally, email is about communicating and working with others. Nevertheless, the collaboration aspect of email is framed as an extension of the personal.)

It’s time to come out with another in our series of monthly-ish Chandler Desktop releases. Chandler Desktop 0.7.6 will contain the following two major features:

1. Separate detail view windows: This has been
   requested fairly often in the past. We’re
   nailing down the final UI for opening a new top-level window for a given item, but otherwise the code is done and has been checked into trunk.
   There will probably be a more detailed post at some point about using this feature: I personally have found it handy to
   use separate windows for items I update regularly but sporadically, like my grocery list.
2. Automatically checking for updates: I’ve added some data on our website to enable Chandler Desktop to check periodically (weekly is the default) for new releases. The app will pop up a dialog that tells you what the new release is, and allows you to click a button to download it in your
   web browser.

Besides this, there are quite a few bugs addressed in 0.7.6. You can find the full list here.

[May 16, 2008] Updated to Add: It’s out now … Download it
here.

[May 16, 2008] Also Added: For more on separate detail views, see
this post.

I was mucking around on wikipedia last night and ended up on the Open Source Applications Foundation entry page. It’s been a while since I looked at this and I was surprised how out of date the information was, particularly since the restructuring in January. Although I love the charming picture of Mitch Kapor, Katie Capps Parlante is now our acting President.

I also looked at the Chandler entry and found it a bit more current. It does show the new logo although the latest version is listed as 0.7.4.1 and not 0.7.5.1. The screenshot could also be updated to show the new simplified UI.

I hesitate to update these myself, as I know that Wikipedia has a NPOV (neutral point of view) policy and I fear being biased. If anyone wants to help us out, updating the entries to reflect the current state of the organization and the project would be much appreciated!

From a recent post by Lisa Hoover on “Open Source Apps for Homeschoolers”:

Juggling my schedule and that of three young learners — plus all their extra-cirricular activities — isn’t easy. I need to be able to look at a calendar and tell who needs to do what (and who needs to be where) at a glance. To stay organized I use Chandler, an app so feature-rich that I don’t even use it to it’s fullest capability. I love the way it color codes whatever I throw at for easy sorting and retrieval. It also keeps a running to-do list for me, and it’s a snap to create new events, messages, and tasks.

The idea of a “running to-do” list is interesting. To me, it sounds like a task list that is unpredictable, always changing.

When building a task manager, it’s tempting to go down the path of developing features to map out projects with complex task landscapes: dependencies, time estimates, urgency and priority rankings, start times and end times, intermediate milestone dates, etc. There are certainly projects that require this kind of project / task manager (and as an open source project, Chandler can be extended to support such functionality).

However, the kinds of task lists Chandler serves best are precisely “running to-do lists” (or at least my understanding of what a “running to-do list” is.) Task lists that change so quickly, it’s not worthwhile to invest a lot of time inputting and maintaining a lot of meta-data about your tasks. Instead what’s important is a snappy way to get stuff out of your head and onto the task list, plus some basic affordances for tracking (Triage Status + Tickler Alarms) and organizing (Collections + Calendar) your tasks, so they don’t just pile up into one big, insurmountable mountain of to-dos.

The Chandler Project is pleased to announce the 0.14.1 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 to patch a bug in which users with non-url-safe characters in their usernames or passwords could not log in to the Web UI.

Chandler Server 0.14.1 is 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_0.14.1

Send us feedback at the open mailing list (no subscription required):

chandler-users@osafoundation.org

We look forward to hearing from you!

The bugs fixed in this release include:

• #11956: Calendar ui double-escaping authentication request

As promised, here is a specific scenario illustrating how Chandler can help to reduce and simplify the information in your life.

Use Case: Setting up and Following-thru on a Meeting.

Edit, Evolve, Send and Re-Send the same item of information as your task to schedule a meeting turns into an invitation turns into a scheduled meeting on your calendar turns into an agenda list turns into meeting notes.

A simple meeting can often generate a dozen or more separate bits of information for everyone involved; bits of information that each person then needs to manage independently.

• You create a task item to schedule a meeting;
• Send out a separate email message to invite others to the meeting;
• Follow-up with a whole thread to work out the meeting agenda;
• And add the meeting to your calendar.

• As the meeting shifts around and the agenda changes (all information that arrives via more email messages), you update the event on your calendar.

• During the meeting, you write up notes and send them out in yet another email; which in turn
• Prompts responses as others amend your meeting notes in follow-up emails

When you go back to look for the definitive record of what was discussed and decided at that meeting, where do you start? There are so many bits to collate and reconcile into a “single source of truth”.

By contrast, in Chandler you have 1 item that you edit and amend over time with changes and new information.

Your task to schedule a meeting can be sent out as an invitation email and then put on your calendar once everyone has agreed to a suitable time. In parallel, you can pull together a meeting agenda on that same meeting event item. During the meeting, you can take meetings notes, again in the same meeting event item. All the while, you can send and resend the same task/event item to notify people who aren’t sharing through Chandler.

1. Collecting Agenda Items for a Meeting in a “Task List” View

2. Reviewing Meeting Notes from the Calendar

3. Sending an Update to the Event with Notes from the Meeting

More importantly, all of this use and re-use is plausible because you can access the same information item from different contexts (the calendar and the list view, multiple collections) and there is built-in support for “losing” and “finding” information. Otherwise, recycling and evolving notes and events would quickly turn into an onerous workflow you would not bother with.

In Chandler:

• Meetings on your calendar can be managed like tasks in a list view; and vice versa,
• Tasks can be tracked from the list view *and* put on the calendar to mark important deadlines and milestone dates;

• The LATER “Triage Status” allows you to “disappear” stuff you can’t deal with right now without losing it forever;
• Tickler alarms and event dates automatically re-focus your attention on things you need to follow-up on

This _Recycling Workflow_ works for maintaining lists (shopping lists, lists of questions, thank you notes, etc) and working on drafts as well. Really, it applies to anything that evolves and changes over time.

As promised, here is a more detailed analysis of how Chandler can help you reduce and simplify the information in your life.

Reducing sidebar organizational clutter: In Chandler, you get 9 different views of your data for every 1 Chandler collection you create.

• In the sidebar, you can generate 3 views of your data for every 1 collection you create. For example, rather than having a Home Calendar + Home Task List + All Home Stuff, you create 1 Home Collection and slice and dice it by navigating the Application Areas in the Toolbar.
• Within each collection, the 3 Triage Status sections give you 3 more ways to slice and dice each collection/application area.

Reducing duplication of information between your email, task list and calendar. In Chandler, you can:

• Manage calendar events as tasks in a list; and vice versa, you can
• Manage tasks by putting putting them on the calendar to mark important deadlines and milestones
• Address any item and send it out as an email

Reducing the # of information bits you generate by recycling your data with Triage Status, Tickler alarms and integrated Calendaring.

You can use and re-use your information items in Chandler by continuously editing and evolving a single item over time, even turn into a completely different kind of item.

Here’s a task to re-schedule a dentist appointment that turned into the new appointment on the calendar. This item originally started out as a confirmation email from my dentist, which I moved into Chandler and re-purposed as a reminder to re-schedule my appointment.

Sending, Editing and Re-Sending Email

With email, once you’ve sent a message, you can’t edit it anymore. Amendments can only be made by sending a new message. However, it’s not enough to just give people a way to keep editing a single item over time (which is what most task managers do).

Yet, one of the reasons email is so appealing is precisely because we can forget about everything that’s come before. Every new message is tabula rasa. There is a natural rhythmic cycle to work. We make a little bit of progress. We get stuck. We stop thinking about it for a while as the issue percolates in the nether regions of our brain or as we wait for someone else to get back to us. And then we pick it up again. In the meantime, email’s great at helping us “forget” about problems we can’t make progress on. The problem is, once you’ve lost something in email, it’s hard work to get it back.

Nevertheless, any effective alternative to email has to do a good job of disappearing and reappearing issues, in the right place, at the right time.

In Chandler, Triage Status allows you to forget about stuff (for a while) without losing it forever.

Instead of having a binary choice:

• Keep this in front of my face OR
• Lose it and forget about it forever…

You have 3 choices:

• Keep this in front of my face OR
• Keep this, but shove it off into LATER for now OR
• Lose it and forget about it because it’s DONE! or Obsolete.

You can move items in and out of your focus (NOW versus LATER) as many times as you need in order to finish the job. And if there are important deadline and milestone dates to remember, you can assign a Tickler Alarm or put the item on the Calendar and Chandler will re-focus the item for you on those dates.

Reducing duplication of information that is relevant to multiple contexts.

In Chandler, notes and events can appear in multiple collections. This means that events you and your spouse are attending together can appear as the same event on both of your calendars. Issues that need to be resolved for several projects can be tracked as the same note-item multiple project collections.

Tasks can show up in the context of a project collection and in a collection organized around a person, department or organization or a location (e.g. Things I need to discuss with Jan, HR stuff, or Home Office).

This allows you to organize your information in whatever way is most helpful to you without the up-keep of updating multiple versions of the same information.

Reduce the # of bits of information you exchange by Sharing.

This is somewhat self-explanatory. Instead of emailing back and forth, you could be editing the same lists, drafts, and meeting agendas with the people you work most closely with. When you need to alert people who aren’t sharing through Chandler, you can send (and re-send) the notes and events you’re working on via email.

These are some of the high-level design concepts. Stay tuned for a more specific scenario!