OSAF’s Mitch Kapor and Lisa Dusseault participated in an EDUCAUSE Live! session on April 13, 2005. An archive of the session including the slide presentation and audio recording is now available at: http://www.educause.edu/LIVE057

The session reviewed the work that is currently taking place to solve the problem of practical multiplatform sharing of calendar and scheduling data over the Internet. Lisa discussed CalDAV, a proposal she introduced to the IETF standards body to extend the existing WebDAV standard to handle rich event-based data. CalDAV has been very well received and work is currently under way at OSAF, Mozilla, Oracle, Novell (as part of the newly open sourced Hula project), the University of Washington, and other places to implement this new standard in both clients and servers.

The session also discussed CalConnect, a new consortium established to promote interoperable calendar and scheduling standards. In January 2005, CalConnect sponsored an interoperability event where several early versions of clients and servers successfully exchanged calendar information. The hope is that these efforts will lead to open standardization and implementations that will provide end users with the same simplicity in sharing calendars with friends and co-workers that they now enjoy in sharing e-mail messages.

OSAF, a unique organization dedicated to the creation and widespread adoption of open source application software, is looking for a contract web designer/developer to be responsible for interaction design and web development for web applications that include email, calendaring, task management and contact management components.

Please see OSAF’s Employment page for details on this and the other positions we have open.

We are pleased to announce Chandler 0.5. This release of Chandler focuses on building out some of the core calendaring functionality for supporting basic individual and collaborative calendaring tasks.

In 0.5, you should be able to: * Create, edit and delete calendar events. * Navigate around the calendar in the near and distant future through the calendar summary and mini-calendar views. * Review past and upcoming events in daily and weekly granularity. * Collaborate on a shared individual calendar, allowing multiple authors to read, create and edit events on the shared calendar. * Experimentally import/export iCalendar files.

In addition, the 0.5 Release provides: * Initial support for extending chandler: early adopters can experiment with building form based parcels. * Improvements in performance and reliability. * Email attachment infrastructure. * New improved sharing architecture. * Incremental visual improvements.

You can download the release for Linux, MacOS, and Windows, at: http://downloads.osafoundation.org/chandler/releases/0.5/

For more information, see the Chandler 0.5 Read Me document http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Chandler/ChandlerZeroPointFiveReadme

OSAF would like to welcome Philippe Bossut who joins the OSAF staff as Development Manager for the Applications Group. He will manage the team developing Chandler’s Graphic User Interface (GUI), bringing his passion for the end user and his experience in shipping desktop applications that the rest of us can use.

You can see more information on Philippe and the other OSAF staff on our People page.

The March/April issue of IEEE Internet Computing has a great article written by Lisa Dusseault, OSAF’s standards architect and author of the IETF CalDAV draft, and Jim Whitehead, Assistant Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz, founder and former chair of the IETF WebDAV working group. This article is a terrific overview and technical introduction to the new standard that OSAF is using for sharing calendars in Chandler. Click here to view the article. Read the rest of this entry »

We are looking for a dedicated systems administrator and tool smith who will maintain and extend the systems supporting the Foundation’s development activities. This person will oversee and advise the IT support function for a dynamic group of non-technical, non-profits that share space in our SOMA offices.

Please see OSAF’s Employment page for details on this and the other positions we have open.

PyCon 2005, the Python conference, http://www.pycon.org is the week of March 21 in Washington D.C. There will be a fairly sizable representation from OSAF this year. We will be doing two presentations, one on building Chandler parcels and one on PyLucene. Thursday night there will be a Chandler BOF session.

In addition, Ted Leung will be leading a two day Developer Tutorial and Sprint during the pre-conference sprints on March 21 & 22. And if you are interested in PyLucene, Andi Vajda will be one of the OSAF’ers at the sprints, so there will be opportunities to do PyLucene stuff as well.

The Developer Sprint will be the first time we get to test out the “Developer Dogfood” aspects of Chandler and see if open source community developers can understand our architecture and APIs, and actually build a working Chandler Parcel from scratch in 2 days.

OSAF would like to welcome Mike “Bear” Taylor who joins the OSAF staff as Build Tools & Release Engineer in the Build/QA workgroup. Bear has always been interested in the work required behind the scenes delivering an application to users. He officially joins the team at OSAF after volunteering on the project almost from the beginning. His role as Build Tools & Release Engineer is to help tame the complexities of building a product in three distinct environments.

You can see more information on Bear and the other OSAF staff on our People page.

OSAF would like to welcome Brian Moseley who comes to OSAF from Covalent Technologies and from Critical Path, where he led a team creating a web-based personal information manager. At OSAF he’ll be working to develop the Chandler server which allows Chandler clients to share collections of information with each other.

You can see more information on Brian and the other OSAF staff on our People page.

OSAF would like to welcome Grant Baillie who comes to OSAF by way of NeXT and Apple, where his most recent project has been the Mail client in Mac OS X. At OSAF he’ll be working in the Services Group on sharing and other projects.

You can see more information on Grant and the other OSAF staff on our People page.