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

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

Highlights

• Chandler feature complete date Oct 12. Bug count continues trending downward (down 40 last week).
• Significant performance improvements in creating a calendar, also other areas.

Design

• Progress: Continuing bug councils. Dogfooding Chandler daily. Brainstormed Chandler branding ideas.
• Plans: Branding and landing page work. David Allen discussion next week.

Applications

• Progress: Bug fixing (still including tasks/features): 20/week
• Plans: Fix 40 bugs targetted to M6

Services and Dev Platform

• Progress: Performance improvements (creating new calendar and more general improvements). Finished i18n framework improvements for 0.6. Sharing integration testing and fix work (Chandler speaking to Cosmo 0.2)
• Plans: Finish recurrence. More performance work. Bugs.

Build and QA

• Progress: Tested checkpoint build on Mac. Added performance tests.
• Plans: Get functional tests working on Tinderbox. Regression test old features on current builds. Iterate on Tinderbox performance number presentation.
• Personnel: hiring junior QA person

Cosmo and Scooby

• Progress: Demo’ed week view for Scooby (work in progress not completely functional). Fixing interoperability problems in 0.2 as Chandler integration testing proceeds.
• Plans: Pull out Cosmo Repository for use by Scooby and make it an API. Add a data backend to Scooby week view demo.

IT

• Progress: Handed off phone admin. Finished project to choose hosting for Corporate Leavers site. Handled 39 tickets in one week.
• Plans: Lots of alarm issue followup. More server backup and demo broadcast project work.

Community and PR

• Progress: Mellon report drafts. Tantek Celik’s Microformats talk.
• Plans: Prepare demo for Educause panel. More Mellon work.

Highlights

• Chandler feature complete date is in two weeks. Currently standing at 270 code bugs targetted at 0.6. Bug scrub is under way. Heikki is release manager for 0.6.
• Cosmo release 0.2 shipped September 19 with basic CalDAV support, ticket support and user management interfaces.
• Scooby implementation is underway.

Design, PM

• Progress: Many new icons checked in. Prepared and distributed Chandler in a Nutshell presentation. Prepared and presented 2 year plan leading to Chandler 1.0 including feature clusters and maturity levels.
• Plans: Continue work documenting Chandler design mental models. Preparing for David Allen discussions. Participate in branding discussions. Think about Chandler 1.0 ACL requirements.

• Progress: Fixed 95 bugs (over three weeks) for 0.6 M6, including drag and drop work, toolbar polish, CPIA scripting, sidebar refactoring, week and detail view bug fixes.
• Plans: Scrub remaining 0.6 bugs. Continue work on M6 bug list.
• Personnel: Job opening in Application team to be announced shortly.

Services and Dev Platform

• Progress: Fixed 80 bugs. I18n framework checkin, including wrapping all GUI strings in a translation method. Timezone and recurrence bug fixes. CalConnect Interop testing and bug fixes. Parcel loading and performance improvements.
• Plans: Continue performance improvements. Finish last tidbits of feature work quickly and shift resources onto performance and bugs.

QA, Build and Release

• Progress: Many build bug fixes (15), including automated performance testing improvements and epydoc cleanup. Defined some principles for triaging 0.6 bugs around calendar use cases.
• Plans: Continue bug scrub of 0.6 bugs. Intensive feature testing as last 0.6 features show up in Chandler.
• Personnel: Job opening in QA to be announced shortly.

Cosmo and Scooby

• Progress: Cosmo release 0.2 out and 0.3 plan reviewed. Scooby now in SVN (including demo which will be shown in staff meeting).
• Plans: Start working on Cosmo 0.3 and Scooby AJAX requests/responses.
• Personnel: Bobby Rullo joined Scooby team, working in New York for first 5 months.

IT

• Progress: Budget proposal prepared. Phone administration defined. TWiki security updates installed.
• Plans: Budget review, cosmo demo update to 0.2. Server backup reliability improvements.

Community

• Progress: CalConnect hosted here Sept 13-15. Westwood Advisory Council went off well Sept 22.
• Plans: Prepare panel for Educause Oct 16-21. Submit Mellon Foundation reports.

Our last summer intern left last week and it’s noticeably quieter around here. Anthony, Arel, Brendan and Olivier, we miss you. We were glad you helped us out this summer.

We did figure out that we can continue to handle a few interns and would love to have interns year-round, not just in the summer. Some schools allow internships in fall or winter but we’re not sure which. So if you’re interested in an internship at OSAF drop a line to jobs@osafoundation.org even if we don’t have a posting up. Let us know what period you’d be interested in and include a resume and references if you have some. Some highlights of an internship here:

• Paid
• Project-oriented — e.g. Olivier developed a set of performance test suites.
• If you don’t have much experience, we might be able to handle that anyway, particularly in QA.
• We do Python, Java and WebUI development work as well as QA and IT (our biggest needs are QA/IT) so there’s opportunities for a range of skills and interests.
• Open source means that your work isn’t lost to you at the end of the internship.
• Cool office, people and location.

Highlights:

• Chandler milestone 5 (0.5.m5) built today and being verified.
• Cosmo 0.2-04 milestone released with new interoperability features

Design, PM

• Progress: Draft presentation on Dashboard concepts including clustering and triage.
• Plans: Revise Dashboard presentation and work on “Getting Things Done” workflows. Continue long-term planning exercise. Post more Virtuality work to design list.

Applications

• Progress : m5 almost completed. 7 bugs open as of 3pm today.
• Plan : Drive to m5 completion. Load balance m6 work.
• Problems : Need to review all remaining m6 tasks so that no feature work falls through the cracks…

Dev Platform and Services

• Progress: Support for mine/not mine (shared items not appearing in “my items”). Mail API cleanup and code review. Ongoing performance work.
• Plans: Recurrence deletion. Minor CalDAV and zanshin improvements.

Cosmo and Scooby

• Progress: Cosmo milestone 0.2-4 released: calendar GET works with Sunbird though still some issues with Apple iCal support. Resolved issue with building URLs for sites like cosmo-demo.
• Plans: Mucho unit tests, documentation and final 0.2 release for Cosmo.

Build and QA

• Progress: Chandler epydoc fixes. Build m5 dropped to QA and in testing. Added performance test scripts for the top seven use cases.
• Plans: Finish M5 verification. Proposal for Chandler instrumentation framework.

IT

• Progress: Cosmo-demo generally available.
• Plans: Wildcard SSL cert install. Nagios installation. high helpdesk load.
• Personnel: Chris away through Sept 19.

Community

• Plans: CalConnect hosted next week at OSAF. Sheila and Lisa attending WAC meeting in PA next week (Sept 21-23).

Highlights

• Chandler M5 due Sept 7. Down to 332 bugs in 0.6. Merged Set/Collection branch into trunk successfully.

Application

• Progress: Branch merge done
• Plans: m5 bugs (regressions caused by Set/Collection work)

Services, Dev Platform

• Progress: I18n plan evolution and implementation. Certificate handling, sharing, timezone and Set fixes. Doc generation work. Performance improvements.
• Plans: Twisted reactor changes and code review. Bug fixing. More performance work. Finish recurrences.

QA, Build

• Progress: Tested Set branch and checkpoint build after merge. Added performance and acceptance test cases to CATS. Bonsai/SVN integration proceeding. Converted Zanshin to FSFS. External makefile now non-recursive. Continuous builds for Cosmo.
• Plans: Extend CATS for use by developers. More work on external makefile. Proposal for instrumentation in Chandler. Retriage build bugs to account for m6. Refactor epydoc generation (hardhat and cron jobs).

Cosmo, Scooby

• Progress: Tomcat upgrade; milestone 0.2-4 (nearing completion and release of 0.2)
• Plans: iCal interoperability, Scooby week view developments.

IT

• Progress: Server for Cosmo demo installed at ISC, running, and basically available. First real SSL cert purchased and installed.
• Plans: New Silk-dedicated host for QA. More SSL certs. Some work delayed while Chris is gone.
• Personnel: Chris away Sept 2-19

Community

• Plans: IRC next week: performance and profiling. CalConnect roundtable and interop testing hosted by OSAF Sept 13-15. Westwood Advisory Council meeting Sept 22 in Pittsburgh (Lisa, Sheila, Mitch).

Highlights

• Chandler: To merge or not to merge, that is the question [for the branch]. We won’t try for the m5 milestone until the branch is merged and return to QA acceptability.

Design

• Progress: Demo and status for CSG meeting.
• Plans: Floss Usability Sprint (Mimi OOF M/T/W. Friday: presentation for California Digital Library. Extensibility discussions. A ton of 0.7 planning tasks.

Applications:

• Progress : Progress on all m5 tasks. Branch is now only a couple of bugs away of being merged.
• Plan : Merge branch in trunk. Finish all m5 tasks.
• Problems : m5 delayed as long as we don’t have the branch and trunk merged. Performance went really down with recent addition. Need to nail why before 0.6 out.

Services and Dev Platform

• Progress: Content model cleanup (in code). API cleanup work carried to sample parcels. Revision to i18n string translation model. Timezone bug fixes.
• Plans: Continue working on set/collection branch integration. Continue content model cleanup to wiki. More resources on performance. Timezone bug fixes.

QA/Build

• Progress: CATS rearchitecture. New perf test cases. Tested recurrence and timezone feature work. ICU/PyICU upgraded. Zanshin revved.
• Plans: Branch acceptability testing. Simplify CATS setup script. Upgrade libxml2.

Cosmo/Scooby

• Progress: Facelift to Cosmo GUI
• Plans: Apple iCal interoperability

• Progress: Cosmo demo server hardware built and awaiting install at colo this week. IT app dev server now in use.
• Plans: Real SSL certs. Server backups improved. Some work delayed while Chris is gone.
• Personnel: Chris Haumesser on vacation Sept 2-20

Community

• Progress: CSG/WAC recalibration meeting past and tentatively successful — communication definitely happened
• Plans: Debrief from the recalibration meeting. More planning for CalConnect meeting Sept 13-15. Start preparing for next CSG meeting Sept 21-23. IRC topic this week: i18n.

Highlights

• Chandler 0.6 M5 planned for next week but evaluating delayed projects.
• Cosmo 0.2-3 planned for this week.
• Scooby release 0.1 planning.

Design

• Progress: Second draft of 0.7 tenets and themes and project break-down. WAC prep on deliverables and mobile device research. M5 bug review. Bringing Matt up to speed on design.
• Plans: Dashboard design presentation prep. Prepare for Floss Usability Sprint. Attribute manager GUI proposal.

Applications

• Progress : ItemCollection conversion to sets completed. Progress on m5 tasks.
• Plan : Merge branch in trunk. Finish all m5 tasks.
• Problems : Merge of sets work in trunk is late and will likely delay m5.

Services

• Progress: Set/Collection integration work (e.g. Sharing). Timezones work.
• Plans: ACL client library code

Dev Platform

• Progress: More parcel.xml gone away. Repository and Set/Collection work proceeding in branch. First round i18n refactoring checked in.
• Plans: Clean up Content model Wiki pages. API documentation. Finish eliminating parcel.xml. More Set/Collection work.

QA/ Build

• Progress: Tested checkpoint build 0815. Add perf test cases to CATS. QA intern presentation at all-entity meeting. Bonsai/SVN work. Created FC4 Test server with Japanese locale.
• Plans: Add setup scripts and config files to CATS. Test recurrence and timezone features.

Cosmo/Scooby

• Progress: Cosmo now stores events as specialized JCR node trees — ready for REPORT implementation. Upgraded Jackrabbit (strong ETags and PROPPATCH). CalDAV properties supported. Developed feature plan for Scooby 0.1. Selected Prototype AJAX/JavaScript library.
• Plans: Release Cosmo 0.2-3 (milestone 3) this week. Begin Apple iCal interoperability work. Break down tasks for Scooby 0.1 features. Prepare to present status/plans for WAC.
• Personnel: Interview designers.

IT

• Progress: Asset inventory collated. Cosmo hosting planning.
• Plans: Finish IT app/dev project. Complete system inventory.
• Personnel: Jared began full-time.

Community

• Plans: CSG /WAC Recalibration meeting coming up next week — Pieter, Lisa, Sheila preparing. CalConnect meeting coming up Sep 13-15 also hosted by OSAF. Mimi presenting to CDL and participating in Floss Usability Sprint.

Highlights

• Chandler M5 milestone will occur either on Aug 24 or when Item Collection and Set work is checked in. A lot of Chandler development progress evidently being made right now.
• Scooby work officially kicked off with Matt Eernisse’s arrival.

Design

• Progress: Prepared candidate themes or tenets for work in 0.7 release, as well as SWAGs for high-level projects.
• Plans: Finish virtuality paper, work on PIM workflows presentation

Application

• Plan : Alec helping John more closely on Sets and Collections. m5 tasks.
• Progress : Lots of people at OSCon last week. Some progress against m5.
• Problems : Sets and Collections a risk, likely making m5 slip
• Personnel: Last week of Arel Cordero’s internship!

Services

• Progress: Some SSL bugs fixed. Timezone support on individual events. Lots of sharing progress. Zanshin code reviewed.
• Plans: Checkin and review timezone support. Recurrence proxies.
• Problems: ACL support in Zanshin at risk.
• Personnel: Jeffrey Harris to start full-time, in-office, Aug 29.

Dev Platform

• Progress: Lots of progress in schema API and replacing parcel.xml. Logging framework cleaned up. Lots of i18n progress.
• Plans: Content model review. Vote on getting rid of parcel XML. Set integration work.
• Personnel: Andi on vacation.

QA/Build

• Progress: Tinderbox SVN integration complete. Multiple build bugs fixed.
• Plans: Finish Bonsai SVN integration which is nearly complete. Fix bug 2818. Launch/host more automated tests (CATS) making use of CPIA Script.
• Personnel: Last week of Anthony De Franco’s internship!

Cosmo/Scooby

• Progress: Parsing iCalendar bodies in PUT requests. Integrated Jackrabbit upgrades. OSCon panel. Evaluated AJAX libraries for use in Scooby — tentative recommendation to use prototype.
• Plans: Evolve Brendan’s mockup into a data-backed WebApp — focus on dynamic and sexy calendar week view.
• Personnel: Matt Eernisse joined team last week and is spending this week in the office.

• Progress: Plans to support Chandler 0.6 testing and usage by hosting Cosmo. Server database active.
• Plans: Complete application development infrastructure work for IT projects. Complete systems inventory.
• Personnel: Jared Rhine is now full-time with OSAF

Community

• Progress: OSCon panels and presentations complete.
• Plans: CSG Recalibration meeting coming up Aug 22-23 — Pieter, Lisa, Sheila preparing. CalConnect meeting coming up Sep 13-15 also hosted by OSAF.