OSAF Funded by Mellon Foundation

I'm very pleased to announce that OSAF has a received a grant of just over $98,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop a design specification, schedule and budget for a higher education version of Chandler, an open-source personal information manager.

Last December, Ira Fuchs, a Vice President at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, contacted me. I met Ira back in the early 1990's during my work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation www.eff.org , when he was the CIO at Princeton University. Ira came to Mellon in 2000, in order to develop new initiatives in information technology that can benefit higher education.

Ira's idea was to bring OSAF together with folks from the higher education community to see whether there was interest in a version of Chandler tailored to the college and university environment.

Ira introduced us to several member universities of the Common Solutions Group, a set of leading institutions working together to create a common infrastructure and toolset required for the future of their institutions. We traveled to New York in mid-December to meet with representatives of CSG schools and then met again for a full day in Berkeley in January.

These meetings were instrumental in helping OSAF evolve its thinking. My blog of February 2 on Chandler in Organizations came as a result. To have the kind of real world impact we aim for, we have to have a version of Chandler which can be widely deployed in organizations, the overwhelming majority of which will want a solution which involves some degree of centralized administration and control. The opportunity to develop a version for colleges and universities is an attractive one as a first, major step in organizational adoption, which eventually will extend, through the long-term efforts of ourselves and others towards corporate enterprises of all sizes. Higher education environments have traditionally been early adopters (as well as originators) of innovative software, so the fit with what OSAF is doing is a good one. From their side, the universities we've spoken with feel a real need for open, standards-based systems which can integrate messaging and calendaring. It's a case of mutual attraction.

We are presently hard at work understanding requirements for a campus version of Chandler. For instance, on a typical day, many students will want to access information from multiple computers, some of them in computer labs and clusters of public kiosks. This introduces nomadic access requirements. In addition, Chandler will need to interoperate well with standards-based messaging systems like IMAP. Finally, universities do not rely on firewalls for security, but tend to cryptographically-enabled methods of user authentication for access to data.

We are developing a plan over the next months which we hope will form the basis of a collaboration with CSG members for the development and release of that product. Once we have a detailed idea of what is required to create a Higher Education version of Chandler, we'll be in a better position to determine if and how we can do the actual development. We remain absolutely committed to our original idea of Chandler as a self-managed, server-optional environment for small-to-medium groups. As we understand the requirements of the higher education segment better, we will know more about whether we are talking about a single version with additions for campus environments or two distinct versions of the product. Stay tuned.

For now, let me say how pleased I am that Ira reached out to us to initiate these discussions and that the Mellon Foundation has seen fit to make this initial grant. Probably the question I am asked most frequently after "when will Chandler be ready?" is how we expect to support ourselves. I've said from the outset that I thought there would be multiple sources of income -- from corporate sponsorship to licensing fees to foundation support. When I wrote this I had no idea that it would be coming this soon.

Posted by mitch@osafoundation.org at April 01, 2003 04:30 PM