If you are in the area, we’d love to see you at the conference! (I will be updating this post with details as to which day we will be presenting.)

Update We will be presenting at 3PM on Tuesday Nov 18th. Here is the full schedule.

Below is the description for our sessions.

Chandler is an open source Note-to-Self Organizer designed for personal and small-group task management and calendaring, created by the Open Source Application Foundation.

Since our Preview release, we’ve had a number of users from a wide range of non-profits (ie. universities, other open source projects, summer camps, green technology, etc). Some are using Chandler individually, others have looped spouses and co-workers in to collaborate on projects and day-to-day tasks. You can read some of their stories here.

We will begin with a quick introduction to Chandler and demo what it is capable of today. However, the focus of the talk will be on newly started re-architecture work that will enable Chandler’s core note, task and calendar management workflows to become the anchor for a fully extensible and customizable information management platform.

To appeal to both everyday users of the software and developers with a technical interest in the project, our presentation will be two-part. First, we will walk through some user scenarios and then we will provide a technical overview of the re-architecture work we’ve been doing.

Session 1: Extending Chandler: Chandler as a Confluence of Workflows

You can try out Chandler’s core information management workflows in the current 1.0 release: Collecting new information. Triaging tasks. Scheduling and reminders. List management and note-taking. Sharing and collaboration. Still, it was always our intention to build on these workflows to include document management, issue-tracking, and CRM (or to be even more specific, grant proposals, newsletters, and donor profiles).

In this session, we will walk through one scenario that demonstrates how Chandler’s workflow can be:

1. Extended to integrate new kinds of information management into the core workflows mentioned above.
2. Customized to meet the specific needs of your organization.

Session 2: Extending Chandler: Technical Overview of the Re-Architecture

Chandler’s re-architecture is focused on providing a framework with:

1. Events driven by Trellis
2. Strict separation of domain model, interaction model, and UI
3. Thorough testing of each layer without depending on higher layers
4. Thoroughly documented entry_points to make extension writing approachable
5. Doctesting so documentation is accurate and isn’t left for the last minute

The re-architecture project is still in its early days. The current documentation is available, and of course so is the source code.

Presenters: Jeffrey Harris, Developer and Mimi Yin, Product Designer.

Here are some choice quotes:

On personal use:

On August 8, Chandler 1.0 was announced and I decided to give it a shot. First I just used it for my personal tasks related to Gallery, which I stored in Chandler Hub, but in less than a week I realized how powerful of a tool Chandler really was…I stopped using my paid Remember The Milk account and Google Calendar, and over the next few days moved everything into Chandler.

On collaborating with others:

…it’s taken a little bit of effort to get everyone using it the same way but the results have been an even bigger deal here…Chandler is a very low overhead way for developers to keep track of what they are doing in such a way that anyone can easily get the big picture in one place. Chandler has gotten rid of the need for weekly status reports to our mailing list…Everyone knows who is responsible for things and I can finally spend a lot less time harassing people…This frees up a lot of time so that developers can get back to developing and our meetings are back to lively discussion and decision making instead of boring project overhead.

I have been following the project even as I’ve been away, keeping up with the lists and the blog. When I have a little more free time and energy I’ll be looking for ways to help out — perhaps a bit of coding on Chandler 2.0. Looking forward to seeing what happens in the next phase of the project…

The outage will last from about 9am to perhaps 2pm or so.  There won’t be any changes other than moving cities and IP addresses, but there may continue to be small problems after that that get fixed over a couple days.  Your patience is appreciated.  Please report any problems you have after the outage to the chandler-users mailing list and IRC channel.

EUGENE KIM: Eugene is the cofounder and principal of Blue Oxen Associates, a think tank/consultancy focused on improving collaboration. He has developed collaborative strategies for a number of organizations, focusing especially on inter-organizational collaboration and collaborative learning. Past clients have included World Economic Forum, NASA, Institute for International Education, and Socialtext.

Eugene’s research centers around identifying patterns of high-performance collaboration across different domains. He is also a thought leader in the collaborative tool space, focusing especially on Wikis, digital identity, and usability. He most recently directed computer pioneer Doug Engelbart’s HyperScope project.

In addition to his work at Blue Oxen Associates, Eugene serves on the board of the Leadership Learning Community and the Open Source Applications Foundation and on the advisory boards of Tomorrow Makers and Dreamfish.

Previously, Eugene was the Senior Technical Editor at Dr. Dobb’s Journal. He’s published numerous articles as well as one of the first books on web application development. He received his A.B. in History and Science from Harvard University.

Eugene’s thoughts on Chandler: I love Chandler for two reasons. First and foremost, as a tool, Chandler is useful. It helps me stay organized, and it helps me collaborate with others. Chandler fulfills a critical need that prevents groups of all sizes from collaborating effectively.

Second, I love the people involved with the project. I’ve known Mimi and Katie since they participated (and rocked) our first FLOSS Usability Sprint three years ago, and I’ve enjoyed meeting the rest of the team and members of the community since. Moreover, the way they are incorporating user-centric design with open source development is cutting-edge, and I believe that it will serve to be a model for many projects to come.

I’m thrilled to be joining the OSAF board. I think it’s an exciting time for the Chandler project, and I’m looking forward to being part of the team.

ALEX RUSSELL: Alex is Director of R&D for SitePen, President of the Dojo Foundation, and a founder and former project lead of the Dojo Toolkit. He contributes to the CometD project and is a co-author of the Bayeux specification for Comet. From ‘06 to ‘08, Alex served as a founding Steering Committee member of the Open Ajax Alliance.

Before joining SitePen, Alex was a Senior Engineer at JotSpot and Informatica where he helped build highly interactive web interfaces. His earlier Open Source involvement included stints as editor of the OWASP Guide to Building Secure Web Applications and primary author of the netWindows DHTML toolkit.

Alex’s thoughts on Chandler: The mission of Chandler inspired me the very first time I heard of the project. As Chandler has evolved and matured, I find that I’m delighted by the clear utility of the finished product. It takes a very level-headed organization to understand the large shifts from desktop to web that have taken place in the span of the project’s history, and Chandler Hub and Cosmo give me deep faith that the Chandler team is in sync with the needs of users.

ANDRE MUENINGHOFF: Andre is an IT Director experienced in software design and development, and enterprise application management. He has led off-shore, near-shore, and on-site teams using lean, agile-oriented methodologies. In addition to supporting the open source software movement, Andre invests his spare time in coaching FIRST LEGO League (FLL) robotics teams.

Andre is a long time user and follower of the project and is a member of the Chandler User Advisory Group.

Andre’s thoughts on Chandler: What excites me is the commitment to the goal of having users be involved actively in all phases of the development process, particularly at the front-end of the process. The early goals for the Chandler application held great promise. The 1.0 release delivers on many of them, and foreshadows many more. The desktop application rearchitecture work currently underway is expected to enable the project to be even more responsive to evolving and new user requirements.

We have also recruited OSAF staffer Jared Rhine to join the board and I will replace Katie Parlante who is resigning her position. Katie will be following up with a blog post of her own. Long time board members Mitchell Baker and John Lilly will be moving on as well. We thank Mitchell and John for their support and involvement in the project over so many years and Katie for her leadership and contributions to the project in all areas of the organization.

We have accomplished a considerable amount over the past 10 months. We released Chandler 1.0, a “Note-to-Self Organizer” designed for personal and small-group task management and calendaring. Our 1.0 offering builds on what we released for Preview and shaped itself from a wide range of feedback we received over the past year. We not only worked on new features, fixing bugs and improving usability but we also spent considerable time on our marketing message and evangelizing how Chandler is useful through the many user stories that appeared on our blog. We introduced the Quick Entry and iPhone widgets to reach out to both the new users and the development community.

As of the end of November 2008, OSAF will be moving to a mostly all-volunteer organization. For this reason, we have been focusing on projects that will set up Chandler for this new phase. In addition to assembling a new board, we have put together a great User Advisory Group that will take on a prominent role supporting the needs of our existing and new users. Grant and Jeffrey have been moving forward with the re-architecture project which is central to building our developer community. They will be staying on staff for some time to see this project through. We have many volunteers who have been and will continue to contribute to the project on many levels. In addition to joining the board, Jared will continue to volunteer to run the Hub service. Mimi will continue to support the user community and help with design issues.

We have been planning for this transition for some time and look forward to all the unknowns and opportunities of this new era.

The real answer is: Neither…and Both. Chandler items are by design, ambiguous about whether they represent tasks or projects, because tasks and projects are in reality, ambiguous. Oftentimes what starts out as a neat line-item task can quickly spiral into a half-dozen issues to resolve, questions to answer, not to mention to-dos to do. Sometimes, Chandler notes are most useful simply as a way of keeping track of lists of individual tasks.

Jos Yule recently wrote into the Chandler-Users list describing how he uses Chandler items to keep track of lists: Bugs, Current Work and a Log.

I’ve been using Chandler successfully now since the 7.x release, and have been quite happy.

I’m using it for both personal and business “stuff”, and i’m trying to get a feel for how other might be using for Software Development.

Redmine is a web-based software development tool, with issue tracking, milestones, message boards, wiki’s and integrated version control tools. It really quite rocks. However, a lot of the time i feel like it is over-kill for most of my projects. I like the flexibility that Chandler gives me.

On one of my projects, I’m using the Hub to give access to some of the projects notes to other stakeholders, coders, artist, audio guys, etc. … What i’m doing is, in Chandler, i’ve got a collection, Project X, which is where i keep all my notes related to that project. I then have a “Project X Public” collection which is published to the Hub, where I have dragged notes which are to be shared with other team members from the private “Project X” collection. I’ve got a BUGS note, and a CURRENT WORK note. This seems to be working so far, but i’m wondering what other software devs do (if anything)? I haven’t had to get too granular so far, ie. just a general BUGS note, but I figure that if I need to I can create a new note for each important bug, and have that in the public collection too… I’ve also got a LOG note where I record what I’ve been working on…

Anyway, that’s what i’m doing… How about you?

Note The screenshots below do not include real data.

• 12335 Total data loss on chandler startup - restore not possible
• 12353 Export to .chex fails

There is also a fix that addresses an interoperability problem that came up testing the iPhone/iPhone Touch Quick Entry widget:

• 12381 Make eim lowercase all keys

You can download the app here, or by using the “Check for Updates” feature in Chandler.

Open source projects run the gamut when it comes to governance and decision-making. One of the challenges we face is ensuring that users continue to have a prominent voice as a volunteer developer community emerges around the re-architecture effort. The formation of the advisory group is a first step towards taking on that challenge.

So I am happy to say that 3 of our most active users on the users-list have agreed to form v.1 of the User Advisory Group. You probably know them from the list. Davor has been involved in the project for over 3 years. Andre, for over 2 years and Keith for a year and a half. Their contributions have ranged from providing user feedback to painstaking debugging and helping new users get started.

(I’ll hand it over to Davor, Andre and Keith to introduce themselves.)

DAVOR CUBRANIC (Vancouver, Canada)
I have always had interest in personal and group information management. Prior to Chandler, after much searching I had settled on EccoPro as my PIM, and was very happy with its speed and power. Unfortunately, it was also Windows-only, closed-source, abandoned by its developer, and wasn’t designed for syncing outside the LAN. Just around the time that the syncing was starting to become an issue for me (since I needed to maintain my calendar/pile-of-info both from home and office), Chandler started to be stable and capable enough to be used on a day-to-day basis. I slowly left Ecco behind for everything except as a legacy reference store, and—just like Keith—wouldn’t want to live without Chandler any more.

What excites me about the project.
At a project level, it has to be Chandler’s openess and its willingness to explore new forms of personal and small-group information management and collaboration. At a technical level, it’s both the basic idea of creating a distributed system for flexible information management, and the opportunity to see it (re)implemented using some very interesting programming techniques (viz. the Trellis framework, which forms the foundation of the rearchitecture branch).

ANDRE MUENINGHOFF (New Jersey, United States)
As did many past and present users of the venerable Lotus Agenda (MS-DOS) application, several years ago while searching the web for a worthy replacement, I found the Chandler Project. I was also browsing for new PIM tools to use in my implementation of the (then new) Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology. Given the promise of the early roadmaps for the Chandler application, the ground-breaking thinking, and the warm welcome and support by the Chandler team to newcomers and neophytes, I became and remain hooked as a user and a contributor. As is well documented, the project has had many successes along with its share of challenges. The 1.0 release is an important and satisfying milestone for users. With the help of an active user community, it is my hope that the 1.0 release will be able to be marked as the “end of the beginning” of the Chandler Project.

What excites me about the project.
The early goals for the Chandler application held great promise. The 1.0 release delivers on many of them, and foreshadows many more. Chandler delivers ground-breaking thinking about managing personal workflows, sharing calendars, and small-group collaboration on top of cross-platform support, Web 2.0 tools, and an extensible architecture. Maybe one day Chandler will be able to pick up where Lotus Agenda left off and also sync bidirectionally with my Palm handheld. What excites me is the continued commitment to ensuring users are involved in the front-end of this open source project as the transition to an all volunteer organization is completed.

KEITH WINSOR (Norfolk, England)
Having been a Palm user for years, I found myself looking for a replacement with a future. I had spent years searching for the ultimate PIM, without success. I’d found Chandler some time before and kept half an eye on it, even though at the time it was little more than vapourware. Starting my own business meant I was on the lookout for a way of sharing a PIM and everything just fell into place. I’d be the first to admit there are still one or two rough edges, but I can’t imagine being without Chandler: it just sort of works the way I do.

What excites me about the project. Chandler seems to me to be the ‘openest’ of open source projects. It genuinely seems that the future direction of Chandler will be driven by the user community and I’m very excited at the prospect of playing a role, however small, in the evolution. It’s already very usable: who knows where it could go from here?

A few projects we’d like to start right away include:

• Creating a users web forum. - Davor will be sending out a proposal for comments in the next week.
• Crafting an advisory group “charter”. - To be worked out publicly on the Users-List over the next month.
• Recruiting more members! - Ongoing.

One of the areas we expect to work on continuously is the issue of governance. What “rights and responsibilities” does the advisory group have with respect to volunteers who are writing code or contributing in other “tangible” ways, e.g. writing documentation, submitting art work, etc. What is the make-up of the group? # of people? How are members elected? Are there “term limits”? To get things started, OSAF staff has drafted 3 founding members. Going forward however, we want to establish processes for growing and sustaining the group.

Our first governance project is to look for models in other projects.

• Davor brought up Apache Project’s notion of a “core developer group”.
• What about non-software development models? e.g. Wikipedia “stewards”?

There are a few points of process we think we’d like to implement right away.

• The group will work primarily on the Users List. Mails will be tagged [UAG] in the subject line.
• There is a public, shared Chandler collection to keep track of projects.

I imagine that in the coming weeks, we will be bringing these issues to the users-list, looking for input from the broader community. So stay tuned for more discussions!

Note Some of you may be wondering what my role is specifically with regard to the advisory group. I am not technically a member of the advisory group. However, during this initial period as the group is finding its legs, I expect to be actively involved in getting this rolling.

Going into Preview, we had a number of theories about what user needs the Dashboard would fulfill. Some of our assumptions have played out, others haven’t. Here is a recap:

1. We thought it was important for users to get a cross-collection view of all their data where the could process items regardless of what collections (groupings, contexts, categories) they had been assigned to. It’s also a handy way to see what’s new across all of your collections without having to click on individual collections one-by-one.

2. On the other hand, given the number of “other people’s collections” an user might subscribe to, we wanted to make sure that people had a way of quarantining FYI subscriptions from the personal collections in their Dashboard. As a result, we implemented a “Keep out of Dashboard” feature that allowed you to quarantine items on a per-collection basis so that they weren’t automatically picked up by the Dashboard.

There are still some behavioral idiosyncracies to be worked out, but it’s been interesting to see how users have made creative use of these 2 relatively simple ways to define the Dashboard view.

1. Some people use the Dashboard get a view across of “their personal stuff” versus “other people’s stuff”. (I use it this way, although I don’t spend very much time in the Dashboard collection.)

2. Some use the Dashboard purely as a place to collect new notes, an “intake” area so-to-speak. Once the note has been “processed” and added to the appropriate collections, it is removed from the Dashboard. In order to make this work, all of your collections must be initially kept out of the Dashboard. (This is analogous to the GTD Collection phase.)

3. Some use the Dashboard as a way of hand-picking a sub-set of NOW items to focus on “Today”. (I imagine these would be users who find themselves regularly ending up with pretty large NOW sections in each collection.) Again, in order to make this work, all of your collections must be initially kept out of the Dashboard.

How are you using the Dashboard?