I wanted to start a thread to nail down some ideas for communities we can work with experiment with our 0.7 plausible dashboard?

There are maybe a few scenarios inside of OSAF to consider:

OSAF staff + interested Design list community manages a collection of 0.6 Dogfood feedback

What kinds of items would this collection contain? (ie. personal emails, design list emails, delicious bookmarks to blog entries, articles about chandler, urls pointing to wiki pages, images of screen captures of Chandler, urls pointing to bugs, etc)

How might we organize the Dogfood feedback?

• Distinguish between Dogfood feedback we're focusing on NOW versus LATER.
• Creating custom Triage sections: 0.7, 0.8, 1.0, Future, etc.
• Labeling feedback as it applies to different areas of the app:
  • Component: Sharing
  • Component: Detail view
  • Workflow: Invitations, etc

Apps team manages their table of 0.7 Architecture issues as a group: http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Projects/ZeroPointSevenArchitecture

How might the Apps team organize the Architecture issues table?

• Triage: figure out which issues are in focus this week
• Assign "Ownership" attributes to each issue
• Record next actions for each issue in the Notes field of each item
• Record a log of progress for each action in the Notes field of each item
• Use "email stamp" to send Notifications of progress to the group

Design team task and project tracking: http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Projects/MondayDesignMeeting

(Probably something very similar to what's described in Scenario 2.)

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We've already discussed the scenarios below, but just to keep the list complete:

• Collaborative management of the design mailing list
• Talk to Berkeley about letting some small workgroups try out collaborative task management (ie. Computer Assistants)
• Talk to Creative Commons about the same thing (they expressed interest in such a tool when Chao and I conducted user interviews last spring.)

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Some "unconventional" ideas:

Elderly communities

Talk to Ann Moore from CSG who suggested contacting elderly communities about experimental usage of Chandler.

A bit of background: The elderly have not been within the bounds of our info-centric target user. However, after thinking about it a little more, it occurred to me that in some ways they are an ideal community for mid-term, opportunistic outreach efforts to recruit experimental users:

They have a real need for memory prosthetics, which makes them eager early adopters, so long as the new technology is user-centered and doesn't require a lot of "technical knowledge".

Here's a slightly different way of looking at it: For many reasons, it will be very difficult to get younger "info-centric" users to use Chandler as a task manager in the short-term simply because the app has to:

1. effectively deal with their high demands for information management and
2. compete with their young and agile "brains" for efficiency and effectiveness.

Someone older who has real trouble keeping track of even a few tasks and appointments, doesn't have the luxury of deciding to just keep it all in their head.

They have a lower bar when it comes to functionality. They don't need and actively don't want a big complex app with lots of features...precisely because they don't have 3000 items to start with and won't be subscribing to 100s of RSS feeds and mailing lists. As a result, performance, rule-builders and many of the fancier features that we won't have for a while won't be a usability blocker for this group of users.

However, they will need something that hopefully we believe is Chandler's strength: a user-centered approach to information management and an UI that de-emphasizes technology and puts user goals and workflows front and center.

So how might an elderly community use Chandler?

• Shared task list with ticklers
• Shared calendar of group activities, visiting hours, doctor's appointments (Ann told me that people oftentimes rely on each other to act as reminders for personal appointments.)
• Not just elderly, but other immediate memory compromised folks as well. My mom just had a mild stroke (she's both elderly AND memory compromised) and I have spent a considerable amount of time setting up a paper system to record and remind her of future events, but also to track daily required events like meals and medications to assist in her recall of these events, and to journal daily activities as part of memory recall training and support. A shared on-line tool would let the pool of care givers review this information and be able to phone in to remind her of an event, help schedule in-person support like transportation, and to assist in scheduling future events. The shared aspect would let this pool of caregivers, some local, and some remote, work together as a team and avoid duplicative efforts. -- PieterHartsook - 09 Feb 2006

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Ideas from Katie:

Aspiration (http://www.aspirationtech.org/) organizes Penguin Day, an event geared to demystify open source for non-profits.

Mimi and I met Katrin, who works at Aspiration, and actually ran a dashboard-related test on her about a year ago. She was very interested in Chandler. She's not a techie open source developer or designer, yet has a strong interest in helping out with open source projects, especially helping them be usable.

A couple organizes a wedding.

• meeting vendors, dj, etc.
• urls and other resources when choosing vendors
• emails back and forth with vendors (or notes about phone conversations)
• perhaps parents, friends possibly involved somehow in planning

I have old data (in Entourage) from planning my own wedding when I first started at OSAF -- at the time it seemed obvious that Chandler should eventually be useful for this if it met its goals. I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to find some non-OSAF folks for this scenario.

Questions for design session

• What kinds of things do you keep track of together?
• Tasks, Chores, Errands, Appointments
• How do you keep track of this today? How do you get them done?
• How do you keep communicate this to each other today?
• What are the different stages of these things? Todo, Done...Proposal, Todo, Done, etc
• How might you categorize these things?

IT Management

On Feb 7, 2006, at 2:12 PM, Marc Gibeault wrote:

Hi Mimi,

Yes people certainly have deadlines. However, when you're going to work on a project to meet that deadline is harder to pin down for a lot of people.

On most projects I receive some data to work on at specific dates; when I worked on a vehicle I had to wait for some collision testing done at a specialized facility. When the data became available I then finished an aspect of the project. Or when I receive the prototype I ordered I'll make some modifications to the CAD files. It's sure that some of these events will slip over time but that's why these calendars can be dynamic and that I don't post a pdf...

Another way to think about it might be to allow a special Free-Busy field where users can "describe" the F/B time blocks without revealing specific details about their events.

Yes, if they allow overlapping.

Could you talk a little about how you come up with the percentages for your work?

I'm in charge of the IT here and it takes about 10 hours a week. I also do some management for our PDM system and that takes roughly 6 hours a week. Right now I'm on 3 projects. Project A takes 20 hours a week and it will be so until march when we'll have a one-month break for the factory to come back with a prototype. I'll then have to give 30 hours a week for 3 weeks to meet a deadline. I have project B that is pretty idle these days because the customer have to make a decision. When he will do so, I'll put all my available time on that and if necessary I'll take some time from a co-worker. If I plot that on my calendar it gives me, and the managers, a pretty good idea of my workload.

Thanks, -Marc Gibeault

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