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Background:

In Sep 2003, OSAF was awarded a grant by CSG universities and the Mellon Foundation to develop a future version of Chandler (codenamed Westwood) suitable for Higher Education.

OSAF planned to create an open source cross-platform Personal Information Manager client, with the first release targeted to individuals and small workgroups. With the acceptance of the grant, OSAF planned to develop Westwood subsequent to the first release of Chandler.

The grant was awarded after an intensive collaboration between OSAF and CSG to discover the specific requirements for Westwood. The key agreed-upon requirements were:

• Support for nomadic usage and central repositories
• A Calendar Access Protocol (CAP) conformant client
• Interoperability with relevant standards based infrastructure
• Robust security framework

OSAF and CSG felt that meeting these requirements would be sufficient to deploy Chandler in CSG universities. Notably absent was the requirement to create a Calendar server. It was decided that a server development was beyond the scope of OSAF.

On acceptance of the grant, OSAF and CSG created the Westwood Advisory Council (WAC). The charter of the WAC is to act as the primary interface between CSG and OSAF, allowng CSG institutions with disparate interets to review and provide input as a single voice to Chandler development.

Since grant acceptance, there have been several new developments worth highlighting:

• OSAF moved Chandler away from a pure peer-to-peer architecture for sharing and collaboration. Instead, we adopted a server-based network architecture based on the WebDAV protocol. This change enabled OSAF to quickly develop a sharing framework and to be better aligned with higher education requirements for Westwood.
• CAP as a calendar standard did not gain any traction. With CSG consensus, OSAF decided to abandon plans to support CAP
• With the collapse of CAP, OSAF moved quickly to fill the ever-increasing need for a calendaring standard. OSAF initiated and endorsed CalDAV as a viable calendar standard. With OSAF's leadership, several key vendors, notably Oracle and Novell, are now working on CalDAV, with serious participation from several other vendors.
• At the time of the grant, OSAF tried to estimate a rough high-level, non-bottoms-up timeline for the development of Westwood. As with many complex software efforts, OSAF underestimated the effort involved. In Sep 2004, we announced that we were about a year behind our early estimates.

To respond to the above changes and general industry developments, OSAF, in consultation with CSG, made several decisions to accelerate the relevance of Chandler to higher education:

• In part from CSG feedback, we have reprioritized our development efforts to focus heavily on calendaring features in the near term. Our forthcoming 0.6 version, anticipated this Fall, will be usable for OSAF's internal day-to-day calendar needs.
• The first release of Chandler would be an early CalDAV client (a standards based Calendar client was previously planned for only Westwood)
• A hosted WebDAV service will accompany the first release of Chandler. The hosted service would be a precursor of the Westwood central repository required by higher ed.
• OSAF initiated an open source WebDAV server project, codenamed Cosmo. Cosmo is intended to be both a CalDAV server and a candidate for the Westwood central repository
• Building on Cosmo would be a web front-end, code-named Scooby, intended to satisfy the nomadic usage requirements for Westwood

Where we are today:

• We understand that several CSG members have the perception that the pace of Chandler development will no longer meet higher education requirements. We want to understand these fears and present our perspective of how well Chandler is actually developing.
• Several CSG members have urgent needs to reassess their calendaring infrastructure and are wondering if Chandler can meet any of these quite immediate needs. We want to understand these requirements and their timeframes in a much greater detail.
• Finally, there have been many significant changes in the IT industry, particularly around the proliferation of mobile devices. We want to better understand how universities perceive these changes and determine the actions required to maintain Chandler's relevance to CSG universities.

Proposal for a meeting with CSG:

Purpose:

To summarize, the Background section, several of the original project goals have been mooted by changes at OSAF (in architecture, in getting off to a slow start), changes in the environment (death of CAP, new commercial vendor policies) and by the evolving needs of CSG members. At the same time, we believe substantial progress has been made and considerable momentum built towards an ecology of a PC client, web client, and server which will meet, and in some cases exceed, the original aspirations.

Given these factors, time frames of likely delivery, and institutional needs, the purpose of the meeting will be to set a direction where we go from here.

Goals:

• Create a new strategic roadmap for OSAF software deliverables to CSG based on current OSAF architecture and development plans and CSG institution needs.
• Determine what it will take to ensure that OSAF goals continue to be aligned with CSG needs.
• Determine which portions of the above are "in scope" of original Westwood grant and which represent expansion of scope. We hope it would be non-controversial that Blackberry client software support for an open calendar standard would, should it be desired, for instance, would be seen by all as an expansion of the original scope.

Proposed meeting agenda:

• 1-day, noon-noon held at OSAF in San Francisco in June or July -- participants to include from CSG some combination of WAC members, technical specialists, those with strong interest
• Review the current status of the Chandler/Westwood project and plans for the next year, as they stand. Address issues of CSG perception of widening gap between current state of development and goals. Specifically:
  • Chandler 0.6 (fall)
  • Candler 0.7 (approximately 4-6 months after 0.6)
  • Cosmo (server) - 12 month plan
  • Scooby (web client) - 12 month plan
  • prospects for support for mobile devices
• Develop consensus around current major requirements of CSG members in the calendaring and PIM space. If the CSG members are unable to to arrive at a consensus, ascertain the major clusters of competing or conflicting needs.
• Review how representatives of member institutions participate in the project, including but not limited to the Westwood Advisory Council, so that CSG requirements can be effectively be gathered, vetted, and used to drive product specifications and deployment
• Determine concrete next steps