See Ducky Sherwood's transcript of the Demo at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference.

It's quite substantive, so your time is well spent reading it if you want to know more about where Chandler stands.

I thought things went off quite well for us at ETEC.

We had 100+ people at the main presentation yesterday. The demo went off without a hitch and Andy waxed very eloquently about Chandler. Thanks specially to Pieter and Ducky for their support. The energy in the room was good and there were many more questions than time permitted.

People seemed to really get the "Chandler as platform" meme, understood there could be enormous impact, and were very supportive. At least a few developers are planning to fiddle with writing parcels.

I met with one former senior executive at a big software firm with a credible idea about a small-scale business around Chandler plug-ins.

Here's a write-up of the demo from Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog.

Also, here's an entry from Chris Perillo's weblog on Chandler which I thought you'd like to see.

"I've been complaining about Outlook's shortcomings for a while now, but it's the only usable PIM (as far as I'm concerned) for the Windows platform. Jake switched to Entourage many moons ago, but I'm far from ready to migrate my entire digital lifestyle to OS X. Enter Chandler, a promising personal information manager from the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF). I downloaded the Win32 binary, ran the batch file, and in seconds, was staring at a very rudimentary client. Even at 0.1, it's impressive. Whoever's listening to me: you're on the right track. Please, don't stop until you're finished - and ask for feedback every step of the way."

Here's a directory, courtesy of Socialtext, of blogs about the conference.

The first release of Chandler, release 0.1 is now available! While we're still very early in the design and implementation process, we intend for this 0.1 release to make us a more fully open project. We have made the release available for download, opened up our bug tracking database, and opened our source code repository. We have also spent quite a bit of time in the past few weeks focusing on improving our code and documentation.

We are focusing first on architectural issues, not end-user features, yet there are some interesting things to look at in this release. In particular, the outlines of the Chandler peer-to-peer sharing framework are visible. There are also the very crude beginnings of a calendar and contact manager to play with.

We haven't begun to focus on a polished user interface, the current user interface is a placeholder. So rest assured that future releases will bring dramatic improvement in this area as well.

The 0.1 release does have a fair amount of the framework for writing "viewer parcels" -- plug-ins that can be added to Chandler extremely easily. In fact, two of our sample viewer parcels were written by OSAF team members who were not hired as programmers and who were completely unfamiliar with the tools.

In future releases, we will improve both the architectural framework and user experience significantly, with a short-term emphasis on novel features over robustness or well-understood features. We need to incorporate our original features as early as possible so that we can explore their implications, and we need to make it as easy as possible to implement those original features.

I participated in this event last week at the Computer History Museum.

There were a couple of articles to come out of it: Scott Rosenberg blogged it and Mike Langberg had a piece in Saturday's San Jose Mercury News.

As well, Bob Frankston wrote an interesting piece on implementing VisiCalc.

This will be of interest to people who are not already following OSAF developments in detail via the OSAF wiki and the mailing lists.

Mitchell Baker periodically posts a status report detailing the major internal projects and what individual OSAF staff are working on. Here is Status Update #3 -- April 3, 2003.

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.

OSAF is looking for a developer to focus on the e-mail client in Chandler. If you know someone who fits the bill, please refer them to jobs@osafoundation.org (which is read by me and by Michael Toy, our Development Manager).

We need someone with good experience in developing an email client. We have good people who have expertise in (1) doing the back end store, (2) UI design, (3) email feature sets and their relevance to different user segments. What we need to complete the team is a master craftsperson who can architect and integrate all of the pieces needed to make a great email client.

The ideal candidate would have a resume that lines up fairly well with this list of requirements:

Experience dealing with the collection of e-mail standards.

An appreciation of elegant code and a passion for programming.

An interest in producing products that people love to use.

A completed software product, big or small, that you wrote all, or a significant portion of, which you would be proud to demonstrate as an example of good design.

Self-motivation. You will be expected to help decide what problems need to be solved and solve them on your own with little supervision.

Experience programming desktop applications on multiple platforms in multiple languages and different development environments.

Experience in object-oriented programming and user-interface toolkits.

Strong expertise in some of the following areas: user-interface design, wxWindows, Python, open source software development.

Finally, you must be able to work in the S.F. Bay Area.