The Chandler Project Blog

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?

We’ve heard from many corners that starting up Chandler is an intimidating experience, the app feels heavy, over-bloated with features. It’s taken me a long time to ‘get’ what that means. Here’s one explanation: (As usual, it has to do with context and history.)

When Chandler began, it was going to be the alpha and the omega of information management. It was going to swallow traditional PIM functionality wholesale (Email, Notes, Tasks, Calendar, Contacts) and extend to manage non-PIM data as well: Documents, Media, URLs, etc.

The theory was: The reason why information management sucks is due to a lack of integration. Integration in terms of data types and integrations in terms of workflow.

In the meantime, the world around us changed. Instead of a trend towards more ‘integrated’ solutions, people are adopting a wider range of tools and workflows are knit together via a wide variety of interoperation techniques.

What does this mean for Chandler? Do we still have a place in this new world?

I think so. I think we’ve actually been evolving with the rest of the world. We have not been working in a vacuum for the last 2 years. Instead, we’ve dramatically re-framed the way in which Chandler integrates. Chandler is no longer about replacing your email client, enterprise email, calendaring and content management systems, wiki, project manager, IM, news reader…

Instead, Chandler is meant to live in the middle of all these tools as a way to pull all the disparate bits and pieces of information we receive out-of-context, into a contextualized, personal and shared ’source of truth’.

That being said, the user interface we have today is misleading. It contains vestiges of the ‘old’ way of thinking about integration which has the potential to scare new users away, both because there is provokes a gut-level sense that the app is big and complicated and that you can’t get started without moving your entire world into Chandler.

For example, there is an out-sized emphasis on email functionality, left over from the days when we were adamant about being a complete PIM solution. In reality, email in Chandler today plays an important, but supporting role. We talk about it as a means of:

1. Outreach: A way to get information out of the ‘Chandler’ eco-system into other people’s Inboxes; and as a

2. Bridge: A way for Chandler users to get information *from* their email clients into Chandler.

So, how do we proceed to lighten-up the app so that it’s a more accurate reflection of what Chandler is meant to do? Here are some ideas:

1. Remove the Reply, Reply All, Forward buttons from the Toolbar; and

2. Add a Reply/Forward menu item to the Item menu

3. Remove the the ‘New’ button from the Toolbar and really focus on the quick item entry bar as the way to create new items in Chandler.

4. Rename the Mail application area Messages so that it’s more of a ‘Message Center’, a place where you can see the messages you sent/received from Chandler (not un-like Inboxes for social networking sites like Facebook or Linked In), and less of a “Mail Application”.

I will be thinking about this in the coming weeks and am interested in other perspectives. See discussion on the list: http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/design/2007-December/008035.html

Yesterday, I sent out the first in a series of newsletters for the Chandler-Users mailing list.

The newsletter is intended to be a summary of list highlights including a ‘Did you know…?’ Tips and Tricks section on using Chandler culled from the Chandler-Users list and a section on Upcoming Features and important Usability and
Workflow issues being discussed on the Design list.

Robert Scoble interviewed us for 51 minutes. Still, I realized that there were significant things I had left out while caught in the headlights of the camera.

Here’s a brief description of some of the neat features in the Mini-Calendar and Preview Pane on Chandler Desktop.

More egregiously however, when showing the Triage Table, I failed to showcase the considerable ‘Brain’ that decides what metadata to show when for each item of information.

The idea of having a heterogeneous view of data is not new. In the ‘real’ world, our ‘collections’ are more often heterogeneous than not. Just open up your desk drawer and take a look.

It’s a simple, accessible idea until you try to normalize that data by cramming it into a table where every row of information needs to conform to the same 5 columns of attributes.

How do you fit

- Notes that have creators and editors and created on and last edited dates; in the same table as
- Messages that have a sender, recipients, and date sent;
- Tasks that have owners, reminder dates and due dates; with
- Events that have organizers, invitees and start dates and end dates.

The few places I’ve seen this done, normalization was achieved by whittling down what’s displayed to the lowest common denominator: Titles and Date Last Edited. This approach generally yields an information-poor display of data that is not very useful.

We achieved normalization without losing data by adding a layer of abstraction.

We grouped all of the ‘Who’ attributes into a singled column

- Created / Edited by
- To / From / Updated by

and all of the ‘When’ (Date) attributes into a single column:

- Created /Edited on
- Sent / Received on
- Starts on
- Remind on

The problem is, most Chandler items have all of these attributes so we needed a way to decide which attribute to show under what circumstances. This is a tricky path to negotiate and we’re continually refining our heuristics.

What is ‘most important’ is subjective, but there are a few rules that we believe hit a fair majority of use cases:

- Message items always display From/To in the Who column depending on whether the message is Inbound or Outbound.
- The Who column always displays ‘Edited by’ when an item has been modified by a fellow subscriber.
- Depending on ‘the current time’ we figure out the ‘Next Important Date’ is to display in the Date column. For example, event dates usually trump all other dates, but if an event has past but there’s still an alarm set for next Tuesday, we display the alarm date.

Either way, the bet we’re making is that it’s better to display something even if it’s the wrong thing some of the time than to display nothing at all.

(My Space + Facebook are heretofore referred to as My Face.)

Maybe not if My Face means the following to you:

1. Here’s me gone wild at happy hour after I got laid off.

2. Here’s a picture of my boss gone wild at Mardi Gras I found on the internet.

3. Gold text on silver background.

4. Blink tag.

5. Repeating zebra background that makes it impossible to read anything that isn’t blinking gold text on silver background.

6. Altar to Slash from Guns N’ Roses. So hhhot!

But if you step away from My Face and take a look at it in the abstract, the difference between My Face and ‘adult’ modes of communication (email, mailing lists, IM, SMS, blogs, feeds) essentially boils down to layout. My Face is full-on, full-boar, multi-channel communication with pictures, video, music all coming at you *at the same time, NOT a long scrolling page of text occasionally wrapped around embedded images and video.

Gen Y communication is concomitant. Even as your reading this long blog post, some of you are probably skimming up, down and around the page, reading in figure eights, trying to take in linear text all at once, as a picture.

How overwhelming, not to mention tacky. But the multi-channeled hodgepodge experience My Face provides is more true to life. Life in the ‘real’, physical world is a multi-media affair (an oftentimes tacky multi-media affair). But hanging out with friends on My Face is in some ways better (or at least more scalable) than hanging out with them in real-time / real-life because like email, IM and blogs, My Face is virtual and not bound by the limitations of time and space.

1. Location is not an issue.

2. Like email and IM, hanging out on My Face is an asynchronous activity. Unlike face-to-face interactions, leaving a friend hanging for a few seconds, minutes or even hours as you switch focus to engage with othes isn’t rude, it’s routine.

Nevertheless, like IM, the irreducible unit is still the friend, contact, person…so My Face isn’t as granular / flexible as email which comes in discrete units (messages) organized by topic (threads) addressed to an ever-changing cast of contacts.

But what we gain with the loss of granularity! My Face gives you a wholistic(ish) view into your friend’s comings and goings. The gestalt of your My Face companions are offered up on their pages. They’re open as a book, but unlike a book, they’re consumed with a 3 second glancing shot down the page (assuming it loads quickly enough).

It turns out that the very granularity that makes email an unparalleled productivity tool is also the very thing that is its undoing.

Instead of managing people we’re managing individual messages. Topic areas span dozens of emails and email threads. As we vigilantly stand over our Inboxes devouring every morsel that comes in, we lose sight of the big picture.

The fluidity with which individuals can be added and dropped from threads means that through the filter of our individual Inboxes, we are each touching a different part of the proverbial elephant.

So we’ve come full circle, can My Face be applied to the workplace, if so how? Even more interesting, could modeling My Face around the small work-group collaboration scenarios we’ve been focusing on make for a better My Face experience overall?

For Preview, we’ve made a huge effort in updating and expanding Chandler Project documentation.

Visit our new Chandler Project website.

From here, you can Download Chandler Desktop, Sign up for a Chandler Hub account as well as find our newly updated Vision Document and Feature List, complete with screenshots and informational demos of both Chandler Desktop and Chandler Hub in action.

For a blow-by-blow list of what’s new and what’s changed since the 0.6 release, see Preview Release Notes.

There is now a consolidated FAQ that covers topics ranging from ‘What license is Chandler under?‘ to ‘Can I use Chandler for Email?‘ and developer questions.

We are also working on a Get Started Guide for step by step instructions on everything from setting up accounts and sharing to a quick overview of Chandler’s core information management workflows. We expect the guide to be a ‘living document’ that will be continually improved to help new users ramp up. Check it out and give us feedback!

If you run into problems using Chandler, take a look at Known Issues and Troubleshooting.

If you think you’re problem is new, subscribe to the Chandler-Users mailing list and send us an email. If you’re pretty sure you know what’s going on, following the directions on the Report a Bug page and log a bug.

Here is an overview of how you can Get Involved, including an up-to-date list of Starter Projects.

Last but not least, if you’re looking to learn more about Chandler as a project, dig through our newly re-organized Project Wiki where you will find an overview of the Desktop, Server and Hub Service, detailed design and developer documentation as well as day-to-day planning, bug-tracking and notes.

Courtesy of Philippe, this appeared on the Chandler Design mailing list a couple of weeks ago

Kids say e-mail is, like, soooo dead

Choice quotes:

“To hear the teen panelists tell it, that means e-mail will be strictly the domain of business dealings.”

“All of the panelists said that they’re constantly looking for the next, new thing to stay current with friends; and they often use different social networks and tools to keep up with different sets of people.”

“It’s a problem for teens–you’re like losing out on some of your friends if you choose just one,” he said.”

It’s fuddy-duddy email versus hip and cool Facebook / MySpace, or MyFace to be fair and brief.

The most common response to the latest pronouncements of email’s demise is that well, sure, IM and MyFace are great for hanging out, but teenagers don’t “actually need to do anything”, do they? Wait until the brutal multi-tasking reality of adulthood hits them, then they’ll be doing crazy things like emailing themselves to keep it together. Oh and by the way, My Space sure is ugly.

I’d like to take a moment and back away from the epic battle that is brewing between social networking and email and try to understand what we mean when we say email.

If you clicked on the link above, you’ll have noticed that the definitions are pretty generic. They essentially boil down to: Communicating text messages between people using computers.

But really when we talk about email we mean much more than that. Email is an experience, more specifically, email an experience mediated by the software we use Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird. Gmail. Yahoo Mail. Hotmail…Pine.

What is unique about the email experience?

1. Email can be both point to point or broadcast and everything in between.
2. Email is asynchronous
3. Email is discrete, though we often wish it were more discreet.
4. However, individual email granules can link together and grow into discussion threads.
5. Most important, email comes to you, you don’t go to it. In other words, email is centralizing mechanism, a way to build a communication hub around yourself.

These 5 simple qualities of email combine and re-combine to explain our relatively recent explosion in productivity and the birth of the information worker.

In inexperienced or careless hands, email can be easily misused and abused to the point of becoming an impediment to productivity, a facilitator of misunderstanding resulting in all-around bad feeling and flame wars.

In malicious hands, email is a downright nuisance.

In skillful hands, email can be worked and manipulated to achieve symphonic heights of well-moderated discussion, informed decision-making, seamless collaboration and and parallel processing.

1. The ease with which you can move between point to point and broadcast communications means for any given conversation thread, private side conversations can be had, announcements can be made, new people can be looped in, existing participants can drop out.

2. Asynchronous communication de-couples dependencies between individuals, freeing us all to move forward on multiple fronts, on our own time.

3. Discrete messages means that email can be managed and processed as individual tasks, messages, appointments, etc. Discrete messages also means that email is easily archived and categorized for retrieval.

4. At the same time, email threads, organized around topics pave a natural pathway for follow-up, discussion and progression forward.

5. Centralization means that the Inbox has become the ’source of truth’ for people as far as what they need to know, what they need to keep on top of, what they need to follow up on, what they need to do.

Try that with IM or MyFace. For extra spellcheck fun, SMS it all the way.

If this is what we all understand as email, email is never going to die. Email has become a way of work and life for people. Email may die as a means of social interaction, please send all jokes, obscene pictures, youtube links and spontaneous outbursts via SMS or MyFace. I’m not so attached to existing email protocols or existing email information models. But the essential character of email as expressed above, as a way to “actually get things done…together” has only begun it’s trajectory towards predominance as the paradigm for how we make progress through work and life.

To spell it out, this is the vision of email we’ve been banking on for Chandler.

As enamored as I am with email, I am not making a Luddite’s case for rejecting newfangled modes of communication. My belief is that the text message and MyFace phenomenon serve different functions than email and are addenda to the ever-growing spectrum of internet-enabled social interactions. And I don’t believe that the divide between MyFace and email is teen / hangout, aka fun versus adult / business, aka boring.

There is a place for MyFace in the ‘business’ context, whatever that may mean and there is also a clear path for the web-facing side of Chandler Project to grow into an instantiation of MyFace in the ‘actually getting things done, together’ context. Follow-up blog post to come on that topic…

I attended the FLOSS Extreme Usability Spring II in San Francisco last week.

In the words of the event organizers Blue Oxen and Aspiration:

“Extreme usability is a methodology that incorporates usability in a highly iterative and agile development process and that partners usability practitioners with programmers and users as co-designers and co-developers.”

Unfortunately, we were unable to take Chandler there as a project, but I had a great time working with the folks from CivicCRM. The event lived up to it’s name and was an extremely intense 3 days of whirlwind usability.

I’ve written up a short-ish report of the what our group accomplished at the sprint and the process we “invented” along the way.

The write-up in turn generated some thoughts as to the nature of usability and design, both in general and in practice. In particular, it got me thinking about how the vague and intangible nature of designing software for human beings is better suited to Extremely Rapid and Extremely Iterative design methods than the Somewhat Rapid and Somewhat Iterative approach that I’m used to.

Personal take on What is Extreme Usability?

Broader implications on What is Usability?

I also realized that while here at OSAF, we are priveleged to have such a close and ongoing working relationship between Development and Design, there are still many lessons to be learned about how to make that relationship even better.

I’m looking forward to trying out some of the techniques we experimented with at the sprint, in-house. Perhaps to iron out some of the existing design issues we have as well as to generate new ideas for areas of the UI that are still murky at best. I’d like to gain a better understanding of where Extreme Usability works very well and where it works, not so well.

Last Tuesday, I made a Design presentation to OSAF staff about the Chandler Virtuality: What it is today, the workflows it is designed to support and how it will mature into an extensible platform in the future.

The presentation slides can be found at: http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/VirtualityPresentationSlides

Our working definition of virtuality is: The quality of unity and robustness of the shared imagined space.

Goals of the presentation:

1. Provide the vision and motivation for Chandler’s design.

2. Establish a concrete, multi-dimensional user-centric conception of how information is stored and organized in Chandler both to provide context for development efforts in the 0.6 timeframe as well as to provide a focal point for development efforts moving forward in 0.7 and beyond.

3. In addition, we wanted to…

Demonstrate how Chandler’s virtuality will:
– Feel familiar to users
– Meet their organizational needs
– Scale to deal with a lot of data
– Make room for Chandler as an extensible platform

By:
– Presenting research and user-based studies
– Explaining the conceptual model behind the design
– Demonstrating how the conceptual model is realized in the UI
– Comparing and contrasting our design with alternatives

We intend to turn this presentation into a more coherent write-up and a series of screencasts. Hopefully, I will post something to the blog over the next few weeks.

In the meantime, some related reading if you’re interested can be found at:

http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html (A long, but interesting blog posting comparing fixed hierarchical taxonomies and more free-form “items in a soup” organizational systems.)
PrefaceToHierarchyPapers
Journal/HierarchyPapers
Journal/HierarchyVersusFacetsVersusTags

Mimi