Greg Jackson    
to Mitchell, Pieter, Lisa, Chao, Sheila
    More options     Jun 26
Here's what I wrote to CSG:

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There are three important questions below, just before the quoted
material. Please don't give up before you get to them.

As many of your know, the meeting of the Westwood Advisory Committee at
Penn State was somewhat more animated than its predecessors; Chao
reported briefly on this during the Thursday afternoon main CSG session.
It's been clear for some time that, as is often the case for complex and
ambitious development projects, Chandler development has followed a
somewhat different path than originally anticipated. The differences
include a move from peer-to-peer to client-server architecture, a focus
on calendaring over messaging, the unanticipated prominence of a Web
client, and myriad small changes in schedule and detail. Similarly, CSG
expectations of the project have drifted somewhat, mostly in the
directions of more imminent desire for product and increasingly diverse
client platforms.

The result, over the past several months, has been unease among some CSG
members about the project's likelihood of producing useful product
within an appropriate timeframe. Of course useful product isn't the only
goal for Chandler, and I think we all remain committed to its goal of
advancing open source, platform independence, and other virtues in the
dangerously proprietary personal-information-management space. But still.

At the Penn State meeting, several CSG members observed that their
institutions were contemplating major replacement or renewal of their
calendaring (and to a lesser extent messaging) environments in the near
future, and that these projects would absorb resources and commit to
architectures and products for several years to come.  Unfortunately,
the Chandler products will not be available in time to influence these
projects, raising questions about whether Chandler development is the
right use of some members's resources. This led several WAC members to
wonder whether the development path for Chandler and the project path
for CSG members may have diverged to the point where they are incompatible.

These observations led to a frank and useful discussion in Penn State,
which in turn led to discussions within OSAF about those issues. The WAC
suggested to Chao and his colleagues that it might make sense to convene
an ad hoc meeting this summer to continue this discussion, and perhaps
modify plans, expectations, focus, or other elements of the OSAF/CSG
collaboration. For reasons having to do with my occasional inability to
keep my mouth shut, I spent an hour on the phone with Mitch, Chao, Lisa,
and their colleagues just after I returned from vacation a couple of
weeks ago. They agreed to flesh out a proposal for a focused meeting on
the CSG/OSAF collaboration, and I append it (with apologies for the
delay -- Group B and an SSN compromise and a SQL Server vulnerability on
campus were absorbing all my time) below.

Here are the three key questions:

1. Is the unease that surfaced at the Penn State WAC meeting felt by
other CSG members?

2. If so, does the meeting outlined below seem a good next step toward
addressing it?

3. If so, who should (and, most important, can) attend?

Of course "June-July" probably means "July-August", given today's date.
Anyway, replies preferably to the list, and then, if we're going to fly
this, we can explore dates with OSAF.
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(at this point I appended Pieter's meeting proposal verbatim)

Now, here is a representative sample of the replies, beyond the several
who just said "yes":
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"(identity deleted) is certainly concerned about the slippage, and a
recalibration meeting as proposed at least stands a chance of getting
efforts focused on what OSAF can deliver that best meets our (CSG/higher
ed) needs. I have participated in past technical review meetings, and
assuming schedules work would be willing to participate in the proposed
meeting. ... While Chandler/Westwood has been somewhat of a "side bet"
for (deleted), initially for its peer-to-peer and integrated PIM/mail
functionality, and more recently for a reference implementation of
CalDAV, a broadly-supportable calendar service for the campus would have
immediate benefit. I would be very interested in participating in moving
the project ahead and working to see how, given the late hour in the
project, we can focus resources on issues that have the most relevance
to our schools. "
=====
(...does the meeting...?) "Yes, particularly if all options are
seriously on the table, including terminating funding now if further
discussion shows that to be an option worth considering."
=====
"I don't think (identity deleted) is particularly uneasy about the state
of  Chandler (given that we can't have it all yesterday, which is what
we'd like), but we'd be happy to attend a recalibration meeting this
summer. ... I haven't caught up with all the notes from Penn State, but
it also  seems to me that a general catch-up on state of calendar
projects and  interoperability either this summer or at the fall csg
might be a  good thing - there's changes with Oracle, the Mozilla
projects,  movement on our UW Calendar, and other players too."
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(...does the meeting...?) "Yes, particularly if some of the
"PowerPoint-ware" can be distributed in advance so we can focus our time
on discussion and priority-setting."
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"I was unable to make the meeting at Penn State, but heard about the
"unease" from the (identity deleted) representative who did attend. I
was somewhat surprised by this report since I did not see much evidence
of it at the recent technical review held at OSAF on April 21 and 22. I
also note that many CSG schools did not send a representative to this
technical review. ... The proposed meeting seems like an excellent
approach. A similar recalibration meeting held last August 19 & 20 was
very successful."
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