OSAF Staff Meeting Notes 16 September 2004

Today there were no demos and no announcements. Mitch spent most of the meeting reflecting upon where we are now and where we need to go.

Right now we are finishing the 0.4 bug fixes and in the throes of preparing for the OSAF board meeting and the CSG meeting next week. Pieter and Aparna are point people for the demos that will happen there.

Mitch said that because of several developments in parallel (e.g. using WebDAV, focusing getting Chandler "more usable sooner", we are now shooting for a "Kibble" release and deprecating the name "Canoga". The "Kibble" release is designed to be something that we can use ourselves.

Mitch and team have decided that the "dot" releases will be on fourteen-week cycles, with an additional eight weeks to polish 0.7 into 1.0. The working hypothesis is that Kibble would then come out at the end of 2005. Now the question becomes what are developers capable of doing in that time period.

As part of that, Mitch and team are examining the strategy of front-loading calendar development so that we can get more of a working calendar sooner. Mitch says that nobody has brought up any complete showstoppers to that plan.

There is enormous opportunity to contribute to calendar standards and interoperability: Lisa is on board, CalDAV is generating a lot of enthusiasm, Mozilla is doing a calendar, Novell is porting Evolution to Windows, etc. We need to think about what the server story will be -- when it will appear, when it will support what features of CalDAV, etc. We need to think about those issues now, but they bring more complexity and more ripples of change to our planning process.

It would be really good to share resources with the other calendaring groups (e.g. test suites to ensure compatibility), but we'd need to invest some time in coming up with a process for more intelligently collaborating.

Morgen asked how Mitch saw the feature set changing.

Mitch pointed out that there has always been a tension between email "as people know it" and how we would like to do it, the "IMAP-folders-world" vs. the "dashboard/collections" world. If other open source clients have good IMAP clients, maybe we should just be a new world client, but then there's tension on front-loading the calendar. We need to figure out if it is possible to modify the UI plan of record (without breaking it!) where we can really polish the calendar part first. If so, that would be a win in terms of focusing our message. We need to figure out what our server strategy is. We need to figure out how much work it will be to get "developer dogfood". Mitch said that he was asking for this bargain: to be willing to live with a non-trivial but transparent amount of uncertainty (Editor's note: with an implicit promise to not jerk the developers around).

Mitchell Baker said that in the early Mozilla days, there were similar discussions that were not as productive because people weren't willing to face the hard choices head-on. She sees our facing these issues head on as a very good thing.

Mitch thinks that we are doing reasonably well, especially in people not being afraid to raise issues.

-- DuckySherwood - 21 Sep 2004