History and Timeline for Westwood Grant:

• Oct 2002: OSAF publicly unveils and announces intent to build an innovative new PIM
• Nov 2002: Ira approached Mitch to find out more Chandler and to see if it is a good fit with Higher Education. The first version of Chandler was intended for individuals and small workgroups. Mitch and Ira decided it was worth a meeting to explore possible changes in OSAF direction.
• Dec 2002: Ira, representatives from CSG and OSAF meet at NYC to better understand each other's backgrounds and motivations. OSAF described broad plans. CSG describe future needs and pain points. It was decided there were sufficient potential synergies between Chandler and projected Higher Ed requirements to merit a further technical meeting to explore OSAF/CSG collaboration. OSAF affirmed that while targeting individuals and small workgroups was the initial plan of record, focusing on the Higher Education market in the longer term was entirely compatible with OSAF's mission and made a lot of strategic sense.
• Jan 2003: Technical meeting held at UC Berkeley. OSAF presented technical plans, architecture and rationale for technology selections. Technical "gurus" from CSG presented Higher Ed perspectives and issues around security, network architectures, calendaring and interoperability. At the end of the meeting, it was decided that there was good technology and philosophical compatibility between CSG and OSAF. It was decided that it was worthwhile for OSAF to develop a detailed proposal for a version of Chandler that will built from the ground up with Higher Ed requirements in mind.
• Mar 2003: OSAF received a grant from Mellon to pursue exploratory feasibility project for Higher Education version of Chandler, codenamed Westwood
• Feb thru Apr 2003: OSAF collaborated with CSG to gather detailed requirements for Westwood. Teams (with representatives from both OSAF and CSG technical staff) were formed around 6 key areas of inquiry:
  • Email
  • Calendar
  • Contacts
  • Security & Networking
  • Security & Identity
  • Deployment and interoperability
• May 2003: OSAF presented findings for detailed Westwood requirements at Spring CSG meeting. Key requirements include:
  1. Nomadic usage and central Repositories
  2. Standards based CAP Client
  3. Full interoperability with standards based infrastructure
  4. Robust security framework
  • Although there were known uncertainties, especially around calendaring standards, Westwood requirements were well received by CSG. Encouraged by CSG response, Ira worked with OSAF to table Westwood grant for Sep 2003 Mellon board meeting. Biggest issue within OSAF was to develop both the first version of Chandler which simulataneously developing plans for the second version of Chandler that would be more suitable for higher ed. Both Mellon and CSG agreed that while the first release of Chandler would not meet higher education requirements, if Chandler were to be successful in higher education, it was worth investing in Chandler at the start.
• May thru July 2003: OSAF developed more detailed plans for Westwood including tentative schedules and resource requirements. Ira and Mellon understood that because Westwood was a long-term project, the plans detailed in the grant proposal carried many unquantifiable risks which we attempted to detail in the proposal.
• July 2003: Ira managed to get unanimous support from all CSG members. Ira approved OSAF's grant proposal and agreed to submit it the the board.
• Sep 2003: Mellon board approves Westwood grant proposal
• Sep 2003: Working with CSG, OSAF creates Westwood Advisory Council (WAC), comprising of 6 members from CSG schools and a representative from NITLE. WAC meets 3 times a year coincident with regular CSG meetings. WAC meetings are key means to update CSG of Chandler progress and to get continued feedback about changing higher education requirements. In addition, OSAF hosts WAC technical meetings 1-2 times per year as needed.

Key Changes in Chandler plans since Mellon grant was submitted:

• Moved away from a pure peer-to-peer architecture. Decided on WebDAV as a underlying standard to enable collaboration and coordination.
• CAP as calendar standard did not gain any traction. With CSG consensus, OSAF decided to abandon plans to support CAP
• OSAF initiated and endorsed CalDAV as viable calendar standard with a much higher chance of success
• Because of above changes, OSAF decided to pull several Westwood requirements into Kibble timeframe, even as Chandler schedule slips:
  • Kibble will be an early CalDAV client (Standards based calendar client was only planned for Westwood)
  • Kibble will offer a hosted WebDAV service, offering free accounts to early Chandler users. Such users will not need a sys admin to deploy and use Chandler. WebDAV hosted service could be a precursor of the Westwood central repository that Higher Education requires.
  • OSAF initiated an open source WebDAV server project, codename Cosmo. Cosmo is intended to be both a CalDAV server and a potential candidate for Westwood central repository.