Busy, Busy, Busy

Committing to this weblog has made me more sympathetic to journalists who regularly work under a deadline. I'm falling short of my goal of posting every other day. Herewith, some catch up.

For the first time in longer than I can remember, I haven't been able to get through all my email by the end of the day. This has been pretty much of a personal religious observance, so it feels somewhat sinful to leave mail opened at the end of the day. I try to be fanatically organized (which may be why I like the idea of Chandler so much). For email this means reading everything the day it comes in (not counting non-OSAF mailing lists), replying to all of the mail which requires a brief answer, and developing an action plan to deal with anything requiring considered thinking.

It's been a pet peeve of mine that many people don't have the courtesy to reply, even briefly, to personal email from a professional colleague. I'm not talking about spam, other kinds of bulk mail, or email from strangers. For instance, I recently sent out a query to about 20 CEO's of venture-backed firms with whom I have at least a slight connection concerning their interest in participating in a research project on quality of worklife in startups. None of it came out of the blue to any of them. All the CEO's were aware of the project. I would estimate perhaps 2/3 of the CEO's never bothered to reply at all, even though I included pre-fab check boxes to make it easy to respond. I just don't get this behavior. (By the way, all of the CEO email addresses had been verified.)

For now, however, I'm not able to reply to all of the email I receive. If you have written and haven't gotten anything back, I ask that you please not take it as a sign of incivility. I may not be able to acknowledge messages from well-wishers (of whom there have been many) but all of you should know the good will expressed for OSAF has been much, much larger than any of us imagined, and we thank you for your support.

Many people have written to volunteer to test Chandler, work on adapting it to other languages, or help with other activities requiring a near-finished product. Please check the web site periodically or sign up on the announce mailing list to stay abreast of Chandler status.

There have been a lot of suggestions of other products and projects to look at because they bear on what we're up to. We're compiling all of these and will be working our way through them over time.

One piece of good news -- we are getting a better handle on inquiries to info@osafoundation.org. At this point, general inquiries about OSAF will probably be handled more quickly if sent to the info mailbox than to my personal address which is listed on the web site.

Jobs at OSAF

We've been interviewing candidates for the open positions listed on the web site. All told, about 300 people submitted resumes. The quality has been higher than any of us on staff have seen over the course of our careers. It's not just that it's a tough job market, though that certainly contributes to the volume. I think it's also that developers and others really want to work on a product that matters and in an environment that isn't mired in big company politics. In fact, the flow has been so prolific we have turned off the spigot for now. Expect to see some terrific additions to the OSAF staff over the next month as we work through the hiring process.

Communication & Community

Over the past week Andy Herzfeld has posted two important documents, one on the Vista prototype we created and the other on a strawman proposal automatic secure mail. Lively discussion ensued and continues on the design mailing list. We're preparing a number of other documents, both setting out the thinking to date as well as putting a stake in the ground on key issues. We will have something on RDF and Shimmer (the prototype database used by Vista) as well as on current thinking about the calendar. We understand that an important part of the process is to make visible what is going on with the core staff. You should also see an increase in OSAF developer postings to the dev mailing list over the next week.

Responding to a question posted on the design list about whether there is a formal consensus on what Chandler will and won't have in it, I wrote:

There have been a bunch of working decisions made by OSAF, but they have not yet been compiled into a single structured document. The web site, my weblog, and posts by me, Andy, and other OSAF staff in this list and in the dev list all contain many individual pieces. It's obviously much too unwieldy, incomplete, unworkable, and even incoherent as is. A working decision is just that -- something we think we're going to do and the reasons why. Some decisions will be easy to change, others not at all, depending on how central they are.

We have the beginning of a plan to address this and some related issues by creating a topically organized wiki as a collaborative document to represent the current state of thinking and discussion about Chandler design. The wiki will include both design commitments and summaries of major design issues being discussed on the list. In this way, someone who has an interest in a particular area can consult the wiki as a starting point and from there dive into discussion threads on the list relevant to that topic. We hope this will facilitate community participation in the design.

How will we do this? We'd like the wiki to be open to volunteer editors who want to take responsibility for tracking a certain area. OSAF staff will also actively participate in editing and keeping it up do date. I'm waving my hands here as this is a part we haven't yet worked out. Obviously, a lot depends on having a logical topical organization overall and editors who can succinctly summarize different points of view about particular issues as they are written up in the design list.

The details of the plan will be worked out on the process list once we can put up a strawman draft, which will be shortly. We're all going to learn together how to do this

Posted by mitch@osafoundation.org at November 07, 2002 08:13 AM