Status Preparing for review by the Ops team. PPD team is going to try out prioritizing the Factors (Step 2 in Next Actions). Proposal is to have Ops team do a test run of Prioritization as well.

Email 1: Setting Context

Constraints and Motivations

• Mitch plans to scope down spending on the project in a little over 2 years
• He estimates that this gives us about a year (Q1/Q2 2007) to bring something to market that can beging to generate revenue for OSAF and put us on the road of self-sustenance.

What we already have Today

• Working code
• Existing designs
• Existing architecture decisions
• Available resources (both in terms of quantity and skillset)

Assumptions

• The road to self-sustenance is paved with users. Whatever we do, our number one priority is to Get Users.

Goals

Given these contrainsts, we are embarking on an exercise over the next month to nail down a coherent product strategy.

• To help narrow the scope for 1.0 in the hopes of getting to 1.0 faster.
• So that the organization as a whole has a shared "image of success" (aka our 1.0 goal) in design and engineering discussions going forward, also in the hopes of getting to 1.0 faster.

Non-Goals

Happening in parallel with this effort is a separate discussion about Business Development strategy. Eventually, these two discussions will have to merge, rationalize and form a coherent plan. However in the short-term, we think that it's more important to make progress, so we've decided to embark on a more user-centered exercise. In other words, we're focusing on Ecosystem 1.0's value proposition to users, not how Ecosystem 1.0 will make money.

What does a coherent Product* Strategy look like?

*We're calling this a Product Strategy for now. This may change if we decide that Ecosystem 1.0 or some sub-set of it should be modeled more as a Service (ie. Tivo) than as a Product (Xbox).

• Something that takes all 3 OSAF projects into consideration: Chandler, Cosmo and Scooby. What we need is a eco-system product strategy.
• Something that describes the end-user problem we want to solve.
• Something that will help us make some hard decisions about design, architecture and implementation details even:
  • What is our Email strategy?
  • Who are our Target users?
  • What is the Scooby 1.0 plan?
  • Should Cosmo be a pure CalDAV server? OR Does it have client-specific semantic smarts?
  • How large does the repository need to scale to for performance?

Approach

• We want to have an open process.
• However, we're not starting from scratch, we can't afford to and there have already been many years of thinking and work that we need to leverage in a way that works for us, not against us.
• In the past, the sheer quantity of ideas and perspectives has been both a well-spring of inspiration and energy as well as a source of confusion and miscommunication.
• Our need now is to articulate all of the ideas, work and people that have influenced OSAF over the years and to prioritize them with respect to our Q1/Q2 2007 timeline for 1.0.
• The hope is that this process will:
  • Put everyone on the same page.
  • Make everyone more aware of differing perspectives on OSAF's goals
  • Prioritize those goals to help guide ground-level decision-making

The Million $ Question is: What combination of things that we have done (and/or can do relatively quickly/easily) are unique and valuable?

Next Actions for Nailing Down a Product Strategy

1. PPD team proposes a list of Defining characteristics of the Chandler/Cosmo/Scooby Eco-system. We are putting this out to:
   • Acknowledge and identify the various things that have influenced OSAF's mission over the years (ie. Values, Original Motivations, Stakeholders)
   • Capture the specific ideas that have at one time or another characterized the product we have been trying to build.
   • Request for Feedback: See below.
2. PPD team proposes a prioritization of the Defining characteristics of the Chandler/Cosmo/Scooby Eco-system, given the Constraints, Assumptions, Goals and Definition of Product Strategy described above. Prioritization means: Which characteristics need to be Usable, Experimentally Usable, Plausible, Possible, aka not Impossible by Eco-system 1.0? Which characteristics are non-goals?
   • Request for Feedback: Do you have strong feelings about the proposed prioritization and why? We would also like to conduct a poll of how OSAF staff and members of the community would prioritize the factors. Participation is open to everyone, however the poll will be purely informational, it is not meant to be a straight vote.
3. PPD team puts forth proposals for: "Defining the User Problem(s) OSAF Ecosystem 1.0 will solve". This will include a high-level description of our Target User and a set of Usage Scenarios.
4. PPD team puts together a proposal for a Product Roadmap (aka Sticky Plan) and moderates a follow-up discussions with the core OSAF team. The process should feel very similar to what we did for 0.7 Planning. A product Roadmap includes:
   • Proposal for 1.0 tenets
   • List of user workflows to support
   • List of features needed to support workflows
   • Phasing proposal for feature implementation

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Email 2: Proposal for _What are the defining characteristics of the Chandler/Cosmo/Scooby Eco-system?

Request for Feedback

1. Do you understand the list of characteristics?
2. Did we capture everything? If not, what did we miss?
3. Particularly in the Stakeholders sections. If you do not feel the links provided below in the Stakeholders section capture your personal perspective, please add your own comments directly on this page.

OSAF Values

• User choice
  • End-user Interoperability (interoperating with existing clients)
  • Standards-based Interoperatbility
  • Cross-platform
  • Extensible/customizable (don't lock user into a particular choice, anti-monopoly)
• GTD: Help people get stuff done (innovative PIM value)
• Community: Leveraging the open-source community to make faster progress (related to user choice)

Original motivations

• Small workgroup collaboration
• Personal information management
• Data hub, Semantic web
• Calendars without IT support
• Agenda 2.0
• Mission statement: http://www.osafoundation.org/mission_statement.htm

Original motivations that are no longer on the table

• Hypercard-like end user scriptable app
• P2P sharing

Stakeholders: As a stakeholder, what motivates you about OSAF's projects?

• Mitch
• CSG
  • Chandler: http://www.osafoundation.org/Chandler_in_higher_ed_TOC_3002_05_13.htm
  • Scooby: http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/scooby/2006-March/000236.html
• OSAF Staff
  • The Branding Brainstorm is the best record we have of how OSAF Staff feel about the Chandler project. We don't have something comparable for Cosmo and Scooby. http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/BrandingBrainstormSession2
• Community: OI Are they a stakeholder? If so, what are the stakes?

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(Maybe this should be a separate email.)

We are embarking on an exploration of products in the PIM space. This exercise will most likely affect the Product Strategy in the long-run. However, it is not a pre-requisit for the process proposed above. To get the exploration rolling however, we'd like to ask people to add to the list of products/services listed below.

Request for feedback

1. Do you have any products/services to add?
2. If we were going to pick 3-5 products to conduct an in-depth competitive analysis? Which would they be?

Our place in the market: What's out there? What user problems do they solve?

• Desktop PIM solutions:
  • Windows: Outlook and Outlook Express, Vista Calendar
  • OSX: iApps suite, Entourage
  • X-Platform: Mozilla/Thunderbird
• PDA PIMs: Palm, Blackberry, Windows CE
• Web PIMs: Zimbra, Foldera, Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail/Google Calendar
• Enterprise: Outlook, Oracle, Lotus notes, Hula

• AJAX calendar innovation: 30 boxes
• Web-based, personal event organization: Skobee, Renkoo
• Public events calendars: Evdb, Zvite,

• Web 2.0 information managers: Flock, MS OnFolio