Next week, Jeffrey and I will be presenting on the Chandler Re-architecture Project at the 2008 Nonprofit Software Development Summit in Oakland, CA, hosted by Aspiration.

If you are in the area, we’d love to see you at the conference! (I will be updating this post with details as to which day we will be presenting.)

Update We will be presenting at 3PM on Tuesday Nov 18th. Here is the full schedule.

Below is the description for our sessions.

Chandler is an open source Note-to-Self Organizer designed for personal and small-group task management and calendaring, created by the Open Source Application Foundation.

Since our Preview release, we’ve had a number of users from a wide range of non-profits (ie. universities, other open source projects, summer camps, green technology, etc). Some are using Chandler individually, others have looped spouses and co-workers in to collaborate on projects and day-to-day tasks. You can read some of their stories here.

We will begin with a quick introduction to Chandler and demo what it is capable of today. However, the focus of the talk will be on newly started re-architecture work that will enable Chandler’s core note, task and calendar management workflows to become the anchor for a fully extensible and customizable information management platform.

To appeal to both everyday users of the software and developers with a technical interest in the project, our presentation will be two-part. First, we will walk through some user scenarios and then we will provide a technical overview of the re-architecture work we’ve been doing.

Session 1: Extending Chandler: Chandler as a Confluence of Workflows

You can try out Chandler’s core information management workflows in the current 1.0 release: Collecting new information. Triaging tasks. Scheduling and reminders. List management and note-taking. Sharing and collaboration. Still, it was always our intention to build on these workflows to include document management, issue-tracking, and CRM (or to be even more specific, grant proposals, newsletters, and donor profiles).

In this session, we will walk through one scenario that demonstrates how Chandler’s workflow can be:

1. Extended to integrate new kinds of information management into the core workflows mentioned above.
2. Customized to meet the specific needs of your organization.

Session 2: Extending Chandler: Technical Overview of the Re-Architecture

Chandler’s re-architecture is focused on providing a framework with:

1. Events driven by Trellis
2. Strict separation of domain model, interaction model, and UI
3. Thorough testing of each layer without depending on higher layers
4. Thoroughly documented entry_points to make extension writing approachable
5. Doctesting so documentation is accurate and isn’t left for the last minute

The re-architecture project is still in its early days. The current documentation is available, and of course so is the source code.

Presenters: Jeffrey Harris, Developer and Mimi Yin, Product Designer.

On Wednesday Nov 12th, our final OSAF/Chandler Project servers will migrate to ISC.  The affected services include chandlerproject.org web and wiki, subversion, and downloads.  Mail and Chandler Hub will not be affected.  Overall downtime should be from about 1pm Pacific to about 4pm. Your patience is appreciated.  Please report any problems you have after the outage to the chandler-users mailing list and IRC channel.

Chris Kelly recently blogged about his use of Chandler. He uses it for personal to-dos and reference notes and collaborates with a team of 5 people on software development for Gallery.

Here are some choice quotes:

On personal use:

On August 8, Chandler 1.0 was announced and I decided to give it a shot. First I just used it for my personal tasks related to Gallery, which I stored in Chandler Hub, but in less than a week I realized how powerful of a tool Chandler really was…I stopped using my paid Remember The Milk account and Google Calendar, and over the next few days moved everything into Chandler.

On collaborating with others:

…it’s taken a little bit of effort to get everyone using it the same way but the results have been an even bigger deal here…Chandler is a very low overhead way for developers to keep track of what they are doing in such a way that anyone can easily get the big picture in one place. Chandler has gotten rid of the need for weekly status reports to our mailing list…Everyone knows who is responsible for things and I can finally spend a lot less time harassing people…This frees up a lot of time so that developers can get back to developing and our meetings are back to lively discussion and decision making instead of boring project overhead.

Six months ago, I had to step away from the project unexpectedly due to a family crisis. I’ve really missed working with the team — I’m very proud of them for shipping a solid Chandler 1.0, web and desktop. I’m also so heartened to watch the successful transition to an all volunteer organization. OSAF is lucky to have such great people join the new board and user advisory group — I’m excited to see new energy come to the project. Thank you, Sheila, for stepping in when I needed to be away and keeping things on track!

I have been following the project even as I’ve been away, keeping up with the lists and the blog. When I have a little more free time and energy I’ll be looking for ways to help out — perhaps a bit of coding on Chandler 2.0. Looking forward to seeing what happens in the next phase of the project…

On Wednesday Nov 5th, I’ll be moving two OSAF/Chandler Project servers to our good friends at Hosted @ ISC.  The affected services include Chandler Hub, OSAF mail (such as mailing lists), and the iGoogle widget.  These servers will be on ISC’s gigabit connectivity and large UPSes so we’ll continue to get great infrastructure and ability to grow (particularly in bandwidth costs related to Chandler Hub usage) for free.  This is hugely important for our mission of delivering free and open productivity tools for groups.  Our thanks to ISC for their ongoing support, going on 8 years now.

The outage will last from about 9am to perhaps 2pm or so.  There won’t be any changes other than moving cities and IP addresses, but there may continue to be small problems after that that get fixed over a couple days.  Your patience is appreciated.  Please report any problems you have after the outage to the chandler-users mailing list and IRC channel.

I am very pleased to announce that Eugene Kim, Alex Russell and Andre Mueninghoff will be joining the OSAF board of directors. The Chandler project has undergone significant changes over the past year, starting with the restructuring of the organization in January. We’ve been working for some time now to form a new board, to inject the project with new energy and new ideas. You can read more in their bios below…

EUGENE KIM: Eugene is the cofounder and principal of Blue Oxen Associates, a think tank/consultancy focused on improving collaboration. He has developed collaborative strategies for a number of organizations, focusing especially on inter-organizational collaboration and collaborative learning. Past clients have included World Economic Forum, NASA, Institute for International Education, and Socialtext.

Eugene’s research centers around identifying patterns of high-performance collaboration across different domains. He is also a thought leader in the collaborative tool space, focusing especially on Wikis, digital identity, and usability. He most recently directed computer pioneer Doug Engelbart’s HyperScope project.

In addition to his work at Blue Oxen Associates, Eugene serves on the board of the Leadership Learning Community and the Open Source Applications Foundation and on the advisory boards of Tomorrow Makers and Dreamfish.

Previously, Eugene was the Senior Technical Editor at Dr. Dobb’s Journal. He’s published numerous articles as well as one of the first books on web application development. He received his A.B. in History and Science from Harvard University.

Eugene’s thoughts on Chandler: I love Chandler for two reasons. First and foremost, as a tool, Chandler is useful. It helps me stay organized, and it helps me collaborate with others. Chandler fulfills a critical need that prevents groups of all sizes from collaborating effectively.

Second, I love the people involved with the project. I’ve known Mimi and Katie since they participated (and rocked) our first FLOSS Usability Sprint three years ago, and I’ve enjoyed meeting the rest of the team and members of the community since. Moreover, the way they are incorporating user-centric design with open source development is cutting-edge, and I believe that it will serve to be a model for many projects to come.

I’m thrilled to be joining the OSAF board. I think it’s an exciting time for the Chandler project, and I’m looking forward to being part of the team.

ALEX RUSSELL: Alex is Director of R&D for SitePen, President of the Dojo Foundation, and a founder and former project lead of the Dojo Toolkit. He contributes to the CometD project and is a co-author of the Bayeux specification for Comet. From ‘06 to ‘08, Alex served as a founding Steering Committee member of the Open Ajax Alliance.

Before joining SitePen, Alex was a Senior Engineer at JotSpot and Informatica where he helped build highly interactive web interfaces. His earlier Open Source involvement included stints as editor of the OWASP Guide to Building Secure Web Applications and primary author of the netWindows DHTML toolkit.

Alex’s thoughts on Chandler: The mission of Chandler inspired me the very first time I heard of the project. As Chandler has evolved and matured, I find that I’m delighted by the clear utility of the finished product. It takes a very level-headed organization to understand the large shifts from desktop to web that have taken place in the span of the project’s history, and Chandler Hub and Cosmo give me deep faith that the Chandler team is in sync with the needs of users.

ANDRE MUENINGHOFF: Andre is an IT Director experienced in software design and development, and enterprise application management. He has led off-shore, near-shore, and on-site teams using lean, agile-oriented methodologies. In addition to supporting the open source software movement, Andre invests his spare time in coaching FIRST LEGO League (FLL) robotics teams.

Andre is a long time user and follower of the project and is a member of the Chandler User Advisory Group.

Andre’s thoughts on Chandler: What excites me is the commitment to the goal of having users be involved actively in all phases of the development process, particularly at the front-end of the process. The early goals for the Chandler application held great promise. The 1.0 release delivers on many of them, and foreshadows many more. The desktop application rearchitecture work currently underway is expected to enable the project to be even more responsive to evolving and new user requirements.

We have also recruited OSAF staffer Jared Rhine to join the board and I will replace Katie Parlante who is resigning her position. Katie will be following up with a blog post of her own. Long time board members Mitchell Baker and John Lilly will be moving on as well. We thank Mitchell and John for their support and involvement in the project over so many years and Katie for her leadership and contributions to the project in all areas of the organization.

We have accomplished a considerable amount over the past 10 months. We released Chandler 1.0, a “Note-to-Self Organizer” designed for personal and small-group task management and calendaring. Our 1.0 offering builds on what we released for Preview and shaped itself from a wide range of feedback we received over the past year. We not only worked on new features, fixing bugs and improving usability but we also spent considerable time on our marketing message and evangelizing how Chandler is useful through the many user stories that appeared on our blog. We introduced the Quick Entry and iPhone widgets to reach out to both the new users and the development community.

As of the end of November 2008, OSAF will be moving to a mostly all-volunteer organization. For this reason, we have been focusing on projects that will set up Chandler for this new phase. In addition to assembling a new board, we have put together a great User Advisory Group that will take on a prominent role supporting the needs of our existing and new users. Grant and Jeffrey have been moving forward with the re-architecture project which is central to building our developer community. They will be staying on staff for some time to see this project through. We have many volunteers who have been and will continue to contribute to the project on many levels. In addition to joining the board, Jared will continue to volunteer to run the Hub service. Mimi will continue to support the user community and help with design issues.

We have been planning for this transition for some time and look forward to all the unknowns and opportunities of this new era.

One common question about Chandler is: Are Chandler Items (Notes, Events, Messages, All of the Above) supposed to represent individual task items or projects? If they are individual tasks? How do you make a project? If they are projects, how do you split off individual tasks?

The real answer is: Neither…and Both. Chandler items are by design, ambiguous about whether they represent tasks or projects, because tasks and projects are in reality, ambiguous. Oftentimes what starts out as a neat line-item task can quickly spiral into a half-dozen issues to resolve, questions to answer, not to mention to-dos to do. Sometimes, Chandler notes are most useful simply as a way of keeping track of lists of individual tasks.

Jos Yule recently wrote into the Chandler-Users list describing how he uses Chandler items to keep track of lists: Bugs, Current Work and a Log.

I’ve been using Chandler successfully now since the 7.x release, and have been quite happy.

I’m using it for both personal and business “stuff”, and i’m trying to get a feel for how other might be using for Software Development.

Redmine is a web-based software development tool, with issue tracking, milestones, message boards, wiki’s and integrated version control tools. It really quite rocks. However, a lot of the time i feel like it is over-kill for most of my projects. I like the flexibility that Chandler gives me.

On one of my projects, I’m using the Hub to give access to some of the projects notes to other stakeholders, coders, artist, audio guys, etc. … What i’m doing is, in Chandler, i’ve got a collection, Project X, which is where i keep all my notes related to that project. I then have a “Project X Public” collection which is published to the Hub, where I have dragged notes which are to be shared with other team members from the private “Project X” collection. I’ve got a BUGS note, and a CURRENT WORK note. This seems to be working so far, but i’m wondering what other software devs do (if anything)? I haven’t had to get too granular so far, ie. just a general BUGS note, but I figure that if I need to I can create a new note for each important bug, and have that in the public collection too… I’ve also got a LOG note where I record what I’ve been working on…

Anyway, that’s what i’m doing… How about you?

Note The screenshots below do not include real data.