The Chandler Project Blog

For those that are Facebook aficianados, we’ve started a Chandler group on Facebook. Come join us…

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.

The Chandler Project is running an open service named Chandler Hub. Or at least, that’s what we’ve been telling ourselves.

The term “open service” does not have the clear definitions and history of its cousins “open source” and “free software“. We’re trying to figure out, just like everyone else, what it means to be an open service.

There has been a recent surge of chatter about “open services“. The current focus seems to have two branches: 1) attempts to define the term “open service” and 2) discussion of the impact of closed services to the larger Internet public good. This surge was probably triggered by Luis Villa’s recent work for the GNOME Online Desktop project. Luis takes care to catalog excellent references to earlier work as well. There’s a healthy conversation on the Open Knowledge Foundation’s okfn-discuss mailing list, where Rufus Pollack just posted a draft of an open service definition.

How the new titans of web services approach the openness of their offerings has an importance it did not have five years ago. Tim O’Reilly has promoted the view:

…the fundamental challenge of the Web 2.0 era may not be free software but free data, and the right of users to view, delete, modify, or freely transfer to a competing service the data that is stored about them in centralized databases…

OSAF (the Open Source Applications Foundation) with its Chandler Project and related hosted service Chandler Hub, seems positioned within both these areas: free/open software as well as free/open data. The ideals of freedoms and the public good are embedded in OSAF’s DNA and our self-standards are high. We would love to hear about areas we can improve.

A persistent criticism of many of the most popular web services is “Where’s the source?!” Whatever Google’s goals for openness are otherwise, no one realistically expects them to release their revenue-center source code. So people focus on the most important substitute: data access through open standards and open protocols. Groups like MoveMyData envision a generic tool for bulk download/upload of “your data” to sites like Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, and blogger, including your own web servers. Others dream that application-layer protocols like Atompub, CalDAV, or CardDAV, etc will be widely adopted and provide user freedoms through interoperability. Others worry about identity management, so links to treasured pictures online don’t go bad when a service changes operations (the broken URL problem).

The Chandler Hub service though, is the “full package”, multiple open apis for data and fully open source. (We have not quite solved the broken URL problem though.) The Hub is a straight install of Cosmo (the Chandler Server). Cosmo is an Apache 2-licensed open source “PIM sharing server” with a built-in web UI. Coupled with consumer-friendly terms of service, we have the makings of a fully-open hosted service.

OSAF, a non-profit organization, did not build Cosmo specifically to run a service; the original thought was that workgroups might run their own (like SMTP and web servers) and that they would form a loose network of cooperating servers. (The original Chandler vision was even framed in terms of true peer-to-peer, similar to Kragen Sitaker’s 2006 proposal for how to achieve open services).

As OSAF approached its Preview launch, it seemed clear that running a free service, providing easy sharing, synchronization, and a web interface was an important enabler for people trying out the Chandler Project. Some people will not have access to a private server, so without a low-hassle (and free-to-use) service, they would be blocked from using some parts of the Chandler Project.

Whatever the history, we find ourselves today launching a remarkably open service. Do we measure up to emerging definitions of open services?

Villa’s model for open services asks for the full package, source code included. It contains three preconditions:

1. data access (ability to retrieve data in open formats)
2. source access (ability to interact with your data locally once retrieved)
3. hardware access (ability to run on various sized-hardware)

and three rights: use, modify, redistribute.

Users of Chandler Hub have full data access via multiple open standard protocols (Atompub, CalDAV, and Webcal). Full source access available in OSAF’s public subversion repository and hardware access spans from laptops through large, clustered servers. Even our admin scripts and runbook are available.

So it seems fair to say that Chandler Hub rates well on Villa’s preconditions for an open service. Huzzah!

How we’re judged for the three rights of use, modify, and redistribute should depend on our exact and our adherence to those terms. We want to provide every consumer right expected in this area.

The issues in crafting an open terms of service are trickier than they appear: while you own your data, you can’t be mad at us if we “break your stuff” if there were say a server corruption or downtime. It turns out you actually need to grant the service important rights (store, transmit, etc), not the other way around. Also, when you share an item with others where you both have a right to edit, who has a right to delete it later? Some open service definitions expect community-generated data to be licensed under say the Creative Commons licenses, how does that apply to what Chandler Project is doing (with shared, but possibly private data)?

It turns out, that while drafting this post about open services, the Chandler Project just posted our first public terms of service and privacy policy. Experience suggests that there will be at least a couple of places where we did not write down what we actually meant. We’ll need a longer track record before we can be judged on our implementation of our terms, but we encourage you to let us know how our terms of service document looks, how the privacy policy looks, and how you think we’re doing on this critical dimension of an open service.

So there’s our claim: we’re running an open service, providing both open data and open source, backed by a non-profit motivation and consumer-friendly terms. We’d like to accomplish a few things here:

• Get community feedback on our terms of service and privacy policy
• Highlight the importance of the other end of the browser connection in Mozilla’s vision of the Open Web
• Have people working on “open service” definitions consider how the Chandler Hub ranks on their openness scales
• Encourage open service definitions to address further the thorny problem of appropriate terms of service
• Plug the Chandler Hub service. Check out our system and tell us what you think!

Thanks in advance for any feedback you can provide and also thanks for your interest in the Chandler Project!

OSCON wrapups from various OSAF folks have started to appear:

• Adam Christian
• Ted Leung
• Brian Moseley
• Mikeal Rogers
• Matthew Eernisse

Update: added reports from Mikeal Rogers and Matthew Eernisse

Mitchell Baker started a conversation about the future of email at Mozilla, looking for people to participate in “a new vision of mail”. OSAF should be engaging in this conversation, looking for ways to collaborate with Mozilla.

We’ve been looking at email as an important part of the Chandler project. Our approach has been to design applications around user problems and goals, in particular for informal groups working together. Our starting point was the observation that people use their Inbox as their task list. Another observation: calendaring is fundamental to task management; integration of messaging with calendaring makes a lot of sense with user workflows. We think that people will benefit from integrating email, tasks, calendar, contacts and other related information in one application, instead of having to do the work of patching together information across software tools, protocols and data formats. We’ve observed people collaborating on shared problems with email; we think there are huge gains to be made by converging personal communication and group collaboration. Email protocols are not the only route for communication; social networking and other messaging paradigms are other important areas to explore.

The Chandler team is currently working on a Preview release expected by the end of August: a usable version of the desktop application, rich web application, and server. We’ll also launch our free hosted service, Chandler Hub (an instance of Chandler Server).

Chandler Desktop will not be a full email client in the Preview release, but great email support is important to our full vision. Our research shows that many people sit in their email client all day as they try and manage their personal information and work on projects with others. Chandler uses email protocols for “sharing” items (calendar events, notes, tasks). It also has enough basic email functionality to allow users to get email into Chandler to manage a task list and calendar, but as a complement to an email client. Filling out Chandler to be a full email client is one of our options for a 1.0 release.

If you want more information about Chandler ideas, you can read the latest draft of our vision document or explore our wiki. A user guide and screencasts will be showing up as well. You can also experience Chandler in action by downloading the desktop, server, and/or creating a free account on Chandler Hub. Even though we haven’t released Preview yet, the recent desktop checkpoints are usable (modulo a few bugs) as is the previous release of the server (it doesn’t have the full Preview feature set). We use it internally to share group task lists and manage an office calendar.

The Chandler team is focused on getting our Preview release out, so we’re pretty busy through August. We anticipate getting interesting feedback from Preview and we’re going to let that guide our next steps.

I’m not yet sure where a collaboration with Mozilla would lead or what it would mean, but I think we’re looking at a similar problem space and it makes sense to see if we can forge a common path and combine resources. We offer a perspective on the problem, a server and a desktop application, and a team of people who are excited about doing creative things with personal information management (including email). Once we have Preview out, I intend for OSAF to participate actively in the conversation about email futures.

OSCON is next week in Portland and a number of folks from the Chandler project will be there.

Wednesday morning, Ted Leung and Mimi Yin will be giving a presentation “Open Design, Not by Committee”, about our experiences incorporating designers into an open source development process.

Katie Parlante will be giving a Chandler project update during the “State of Lightning Talks” on Thursday morning

Also on Thursday morning, Mikeal Rogers and Adam Christian will be talking about Windmill, the tool that we use to test the AJAX based user interface for Chandler Server (Cosmo).

There will also be a Chandler BOF on Thursday night, so please come by and say “Hi”. Since the Preview release is just around the corner, now would be a great time to check in and find out what’s been happening.

To all users of the osaf.us sharing service:

Thank you for using the free OSAF sharing service, osaf.us. As the August 2007 release of Chandler Preview approaches, the official OSAF sharing service will move to hub.chandlerproject.org.

Please help us by moving your data from osaf.us to hub.chandlerproject.org. We have written instructions for doing this using Chandler Desktop here:

http://chandlerproject.org/Projects/DavToEimMigrationUserDoc

Chandler Preview uses a faster and more capable sharing system named EIM, available for free on hub.chandlerproject.org. So you’ll need to move your data to the new server to use all the features of Chandler Preview.

Going forward, only hub.chandlerproject.org will receive software updates and our fastest servers. Eventually osaf.us will be turned off, so please help us by moving your data when you get a chance.

Moving your data is not difficult to do. You’ll need to create a new account on hub.chandlerproject.org and update your application configuration to publish to the new server. Your sharing URLs will also change so you might need to contact you’re sharing collections with and give them updated info.

If you need any assistance, you can get help by sending a question to the chandler-users mailing list. We really want this move to go smoothly for you and would like to hear your feedback.

Thank you!

– Jared Rhine, OSAF sharing service manager

We’re please to announce the 0.6.1 update of Chandler Server (Cosmo)!

Chandler Server is a database, server, and web UI for storing and managing personal information such as events and tasks. It implements standards such as CalDAV, WebDAV, Atom, and Atom Publishing Protocol.

Chandler Server 0.6.1 is currently available for download at: .

This release focuses on the server side communication between Chandler Desktop and the Chandler Server. We have created a new HTTP-based synchronization protocol,
Morse Code , which significantly decrease the time it takes to subscribe to and synchronize collections between the desktop and server.

Find download information, installation instructions and release notes at: .

Send us feedback at:chandler-users@osafoundation.org

We look forward to hearing from you!!

-Priscilla

The OSAF team has been busily focusing on our “Preview” releases — functional products that are interesting enough for people to try out and give us meaningful feedback. (”Preview” will not be 1.0 — more like a usable public beta). Our original goal was to have these releases ready this month — we’ve adjusted our schedule to June. The countdown to Preview is tracked on our wiki.

Help us!

If you are adventurous and want to help out the project, we’d love to have people trying out the desktop application and the web application even before we get to Preview. Find bugs and help us make it better! Join the users list, download the latest checkpoint of the desktop application, or check out the web application.

Branding

Chandler was originally a code name for the desktop application. After careful consideration, we decided to use the name for the whole group of products (the desktop application, the online service and the server that runs the service). We’ve chosen a domain name (chandlerproject.org), and we’re working on a new logo. We’re also cleaning up our wiki and our websites as we near Preview. We discuss this work on the general mailing list.

Chandler Desktop

The desktop project hit a feature complete milestone on April 9. New features include recurrence and auto-triage of items in the dashboard, editing and updating items via email, Chandler IMAP folders, context menus, a new sharing format, conflict management, and data migration features. The team is working on performance now, and will spend many weeks after that fixing bugs.

Chandler Server (Cosmo)

“Chandler Server” is our new name for Cosmo. The 0.6 release of Chandler server was described in an earlier post. The server team is currently wrapping up the 0.6.1 release, which implements a new sharing format for data exchange with the desktop application. The team has also started on the 0.7 release, which will allow users to view and edit shared tasks and events in a table.

Chandler Hub (osaf.us)

“Chandler Hub” is our new name for the online service hosted by OSAF, running Chandler server. The service is currently running the 0.6 version of the server. We plan on moving to 0.6.1 in a few weeks, and upgrading to 0.7 in June. Once we’re ready to “Launch” Preview, we’ll use our new domain name (chandlerproject.org).

We are very happy to have the following students working on projects this summer:

Tim Pokorny will be working with Bobby Rullo on “Comet Event Notification for Cosmo UI”

Phil Jones will be working with Jeffrey Harris on “Natural Language Processing with Chandler”

Vera Sheinman will be working with Jeffrey Harris on “Progress Reports Management”

More information on the projects is available here <http://code.google.com/soc/osaf/about.html>

Welcome!