OSCON 2005 was my first conference since I entered the open source world by joining OSAF in January, so it was really great for me to get a sense of the huge variety of open source development that’s going on in the world. In a way, for me the conference was like getting a compressed three-day college degree in open source. Some of the “classes” had little to do with software per se, but were quite fascinating. Examples that stand out here were the presentation on UCSF’s archive of internal tobacco industry documents made public by the industry’s settlement of lawsuits with several states, and Robert Lang’s keynote on the open-source-like approach that has led to amazing developments in origami in the last fifty years, or).

I did attend the OSAF presentations (Ted ’s Chandler parcel session, and the CalDAV panel and BOF). It was clear that there is a high level of interest both in Chandler and interoperable calendaring. In the case of the latter, there were quite a few questions about scheduling (a separate draft from the base CalDAV spec). In general, this is something both technical and non-technical users really want from calendaring, so ironing this stuff out will be pretty important for both Chandler and CalDAV.

Overall, I tried to attend sessions from a variety of different tracks. I the course of my hopping around, there were a couple of session that stood out for me as interesting sagas of real-world deployment and scaling issues, and how systems become complex in unanticipated ways: Brad Fitzpatrick’s talk on LiveJournal’s Backend, and Randal Schwartz’s on anti-spam measures he’s tried over the years on his domain’s mail server. (The latest, a trick with MX DNS records, seems to be working quite well … for now!) Also, Anthony Baxter’s overview of shtoom (his Twisted-based VOIP implementation) was delivered in inimitable style, and gave good insight into implementing telephony standards in today’s internet.

So far as technology goes, I found Johannes Ernst’s presentation on LID pretty interesting (and Dick Hardt’s earlier keynote on Identity 2.0 was an entertaining and accessible introduction to the general problem of identity on the web). While there are competing initiatives in this space, but eventually this is something Chandler will have to think about. There was enough detail in the Ruby On Rails keynote for me to get a sense of what RoR is all about, even though I know next to nothing about Ruby and don’t work on web apps! One catch-phrase that stood out was “xml sit-ups”: the chore of having to edit and maintain XML configuration files (which RoR helps you avoid). In the case of Chandler, too, the move away from parcel xml will mean less ab work for parcel developers!

The slides for my OSCON talk: Building Your Own Chandler Parcel, are now available.

For more reports on OSCON, you can look at Philippe Bossut’s notes, or my personal blog. Reports from other OSAF OSCON attendees will follow in the days ahead.

OSCON 2005 is next week. This year there will be two OSAF related presentations:

Build Your Own Chandler Parcel This is tutorial presentation for people who want to get a head start on building extensions for Chandler.

Implementing CALDAV, a New Standard for Sharing Calendar Information over the Internet This is panel discussion on the CALDAV calendaring standard being developed at the IETF.

In addition we will be participating in a pair of BOF sessions:

Q&A on CalDAV calendar projects from Mozilla, OSAF, Novell (Hula), and RPI

Meet the OSAF Chandler & Cosmo developers

There will be a number of OSAF staff folks at the conference — please don’t be shy!

Long overdue, but here at last…

Andi Vajda and I participated in Europython 2005 this summer. I gave a Chandler presentation, and Andi gave a presentation on PyLucene. Both were reasonably well attended.

I also did an M2Crypto sprint, and while I got a lot done there are still some loose ends before we can do the next M2Crypto release.

We met lots of interesting people and saw interesting presentations. There were some calendar projects presented that we obviously need to take a closer look at.

You can read more in my post to the dev mailing list in here.

I will be in Europython 2005 from June 27 to July 1. I will be giving a presentation of Chandler in the business track.

I have also spared the last two days for an M2Crypto sprint. We are using M2Crypto in Chandler for the crypto/SSL stuff.

Andi Vajda is the other OSAF developer going to Europython. Andi is giving a talk on PyLucene. PyLucene will provide full text search for Chandler.

We’d be happy to talk with you about all Chandler-related stuff.

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.

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.

PyCon 2004, March 24-26, 2004 in Washington, D.C., is a community-oriented conference targeting developers (both those using Python and those working on the Python project). It provides opportunities to learn about significant advances in the Python development community, to participate in a programming sprint with some of the leading minds in the Open Source community, and to meet fellow developers from around the world. The organizers work to make the conference affordable and accessible to all.

Mitch Kapor to give keynote address Mitch, founder of the Open Source Application Foundation, will be the keynote speaker for the conference.

Chandler Sprint OSAF will be running a Sprint from Mar 20-23 prior to the PyCon 2004 conference. The topics for the sprint will focus on the Chandler Repository. At the moment, these include Repository dump/restore functionality, and remote Repository sharing using WebDAV.

Ted Leung and Jeffrey Harris will be the coaches for the sprints, and will be doing brief tutorials for people unfamiliar with the Chandler Repository. We want to use the sprint to involve more people in the Chandler development process as well as accomplish some tasks that will be useful for Chandler.

If you are interested in participating in the sprint, please add your self to the ChandlerSprint page: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/moinmoin/ChandlerSprint

What is a Sprint? The sprint is a four day focused development session, in which developers pair in a room and focus on building a particular subsystem. A sprint is organized with a coach leading the session. The coach sets the agenda, tracks activities, and keeps the development moving. The developers work in pairs using extreme programming’s pair programming approach.

And a BOF too! In addition, we plan to have an OSAF ‘Birds Of a Feather’ gathering during PyCon itself to answer questions about Chandler and socialize with Python developers.

This Wednesday, Nov. 19th, we will have a discussion of the status of agents in the Chandler world. Stuart and Andrew Francis will give us their thinking on where they stand and what is in the works. Andrew has been volunteering with Andy Hertzfeld on the agent framework for some time and wrote the Notification Manager. Stuart was hired by OSAF a short while back with an initial focus on implementing agents for Chandler.

On Wednesday, Nov. 26th we’ll have a discussion of feature prioritization and recent design decisions, led by Chao Lam, our product manager. Chao has been focused on these areas lately. Mimi Yin, our UI designer will most likely chime in as well. You can find the updated IRC Chat Schedule and information on how to join in at: http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Main/ChatSchedule

Both chats will be at 11am Pacific Standard Time, which is 1900 GMT.

Starting Wednesday, November12, 2003, OSAF will host weekly open office hours via IRC chat ( instructions on how to join the #chandler IRC chat channel ). from 11am-noon Pacific time.

We will often schedule discussion topics for the IRC Office Hour, but these sessions are always open for ad hoc questions and comments. The topic for Wed. 10/12 is: The current state and plans for the Chandler data model/repository.

Other topics to be scheduled will include: * Community participation and people’s impressions of us * Feature prioritization * Agents * Design and UI