OSAF Mission and Priorities

• August 16th, 09:30am - 10:45am
• Led by Katie Capps Parlante
• Notes taken by Sheila Mooney

Context for what we are doing here at OSAF

• None of this info is new
• Been on the lists, wiki
• Review with a smaller group
• People are encouraged to ask questions

Mission Statement

• Written 4 years ago.
• Inspiration: Mitch and Freada wanted shared calendaring and didn't want to hire someone to run Exchange
• Inspiration: Agenda. Mitch wanted to get involved in Software project again.
• Non-profit/open source - build something that is more important than profit. Open source is fundamentatl.
• Open Source and Application in the name of the company. Opportunity to fill a niche.
• Feeling that there was a lack of innovation in application space. You couldn't do anything innovative, market full. The cross-platform goal emerge to make this different.
• Communication/Collaboration - key to sharing features. We are doing a PIM. Calendaring without IT and Agenda. Serving a broad base of users.
• We are focussing on knowledge workers - people who use computers to get something done.
• Originally wanted to do P2P sharing. People didn't need full time IT staff to run a server. Lisa argued that if you had a calendar you needed high availability, needed a server.
• There is an infrastructure at the company for email, it's standards based. If we created the same type of thing for calendaring then we would do that.
• Cross-platform, open-source and high quality user experience - important from the start.
• Different ideas about sustainability.
• Supporting access to your data from different applications - web app, web client, pda.

Questions/Comments

• Priscilla - Seems that focus has changed. Not true non-profit, driven by trying to get funding.
  • Idea was to support small group collaboration - LPFI, families.
  • Mission statement has to be broad.
  • Focussing = narrowing in the short-term.
  • Still funding but need to reduce that.
  • Need to build something that is relevant to end users - not a science project.
  • Need to work on sustaining the company long term.
  • Ideas: Grants, ads, service,
  • Getting something for people to use outside OSAF - make it relevant, get feedback. Opportunities to deal with funding go from there.
• BCM - Entire world changed, particularly around target user.
• Jared - Changed the headspace but not the features.
• Katie - Grant from Mellon Foundation.
  • They were pushing standards.
  • Possible replacement for Oracle.
  • Some things were not well thought out.
  • Switched from CAP to CALDAV. Instead of Web Kiosk, we decided on web client and server. No CALDAV server existed at that time.
  • We were going to add features at the rate that our clients needed them.
  • Less of a radical shift and more about pulling in the vision and doing something specific.
• Ted
  • Not surprising that we are dealing with sustainability. We were always going to have to deal with this. Desktop license was GPL. Not many open source project that has people on staff in a non-profit scenario that has been able to do this.
  • Need to work on planning this now.
• Mimi
  • Target user work was always there but not an official part of the planning. Reason why we didn't have a good roadmap.

What are we still hanging onto and what have we dropped?

• Elements of the vision exercise. Everyone had a chance to prioritize these.

• Stuff we are still hanging on to
  • Small workgroup collaboration
  • Standards
  • Semantic web (more long term, not really Beta)
  • Extendable customizable PIM
  • Agenda
  • Calendars without IT
  • Web 2.0
  • GTD
  • Cross-platform
  • Data hub/protocol hub
  • Data available from multiple sources
  • Open source

• Stuff that we decided to abandon
  • P2P
  • Visual programming app framework
  • Hypercard
  • Generate Web UI

• Somethings are best practices but not the driver - open source, cross-platform, standards
• Small workgroup collaboration is the main goal
• Doing pieces of other elements that align with the larger goal.

• Jared - terminology
  • What is short-term, mid-term, long-term.

• Timeframe
• Now=Aug
• March 2007 - Beta (medium term goal)
• Beta = people outside OSAF using Cosmo + Chandler + Service
• Beta NOT feature complete
• Like a traditional Beta - if we expect people to use it they expect a level of polish and feature completeness.
• Alpha = dogfood. People inside OSAF using the products and services.
• Technically Cosmo is in the Alpha stage wrt the feature set we need at OSAF.
• Cosmo 0.5 UI will be the dogfoodable for a narrow set of features.
• Desktop - next release will be a dogfoodable dashboard.
• BCM - Beta is the big goal - not a good plan about what we need between Beta and launch other than feedback from users.
• Right now there is a gap and it makes sense to work on filling this.
• BCM - would like to get a stake in the ground for what Cosmo is in the 1.0 timeframe. Stickie plan.

Strategy

• Pick a set of target users that are consistent across the products.
• Does the ecosystem include things other than Chandler and Cosmo?
  • We can't be focussed on the desktop - we need to pull in Cosmo/Scooby and make these important.
  • We are thinking about how people are using these products.
  • It never meant self-contained solution, that people would be using only the deskop, the web client and only this server.
  • We want to interoperate with these products and have this standards based.
  • There are ways to make things work outside just our products, that are just purely design - not thinking about standards. Sometimes there are miscommunications because at the design perspective we are including standards and protocols as well as other stuff at a design perspective. Interop has different meanings.
  • Because we don't want to go on forever we need to align our goals based on the users that are available.
• Another influence - we are not targetting the enterprise market. Not trying to unseat exchange.
• We are not against this happening but we won't pay to do this. We will collaborate with others who want to do this.
• Make this clear to external people - it isn't right now.
• Interop is core but prioritized below interactions with own projects.
• There is a target user outside the small workgroup - people that download Cosmo and are their own hub. It's not the highest priority for Beta but is still part of the vision. These people will come and join us. Thinking about that problem and need a clear articulation of how this fits into the OSAF strategy. We could make progress on this on the Cosmo side. This is beyond March 2007.
• BCM - Feels that more people on the Cosmo side will not use the family of products. On the desktop this is different. There is a different strategy. If we focus on these other users we will get wider adoption across the set of products. We will get more adoption if we satisfy this group of hackers in the Beta timeframe. This target user should be more prominent in the Beta timeframe. They are not hackers - they just want to download and run the server and point their calendar app to it.
• Mimi - There are many paths to sustainability. The argument is not really about what gets us more user. It's about building Cosmo so that it supports the needs of the small work group collaboration. It not about DO we support them, it's what degree we support them and we sacrifice in order to do that.
• BCM - For the server, there are 2 goals and these are different than for the desktop. The desktop also has more than one user.
• Mimi - For the design currently, we try and make the case for every feature - how it fits into the needs of the target user. We have had to cut out many things because we cannot relate this back to the target user.
• Katie - Beta is OSAF plausible promise. Until we reach that, people don't understand the vision enough to collaborate with you. People can see the whole picture, important that people see this. Need to get something out there that's credible, plausible for the organization. There is something worth coming to.
  • There are a bunch of things that are not going to happen - won't have alot of collaborators.
• BCM - We talk about collaborators but they aren't there yet. Unless we make the product appealing to a wide group of people we aren't going to get there. The priorities are about using the desktop client - we are short changing the potential of the server because we are doing this.
• Mikeal - In the Beta timeframe what would be the most important to do - CALDAV, another protocols.
• Katie - Beta goal is the set the stage for collaborators. I think we can think about the server a bit differently. For the desktop, we are not trying to get people to join before Beta.

Final Comments/Questions

• Mimi - Yes, there are other users other than the small workgroup users. Other paths that are quicker and is appealing but do we want to do that and forsake the promise.
• Priscilla - Why are we not going after more funding from CSG or other organzation ie: Why aren't we going after more grants. These come with requirements/strings and there was a sense from the organization to pick a path that gets revenue from users rather than a grant that might tweak the vision. Something that we are working for that we really want to see materialize.
• What do we mean by Web 2.0 - for OSAF it's related to data hub, sourcing data.
• Calendars with a hosted service fits into calendars without IT.
• Mikeal - Wishes that some level of security is on the list. People's data is not public if they don't want it to be public. Identify that this is naturally related to the other set of priorities.
• You own your own data.
• Haven't talked about the service but this is part of working out the plan for Cosmo.
• Jared - wish they had more windows user in house.

Next Actions/Issues to Address

• Cosmo roadmap past Beta.
• Communicate priorities outside OSAF - have something we can point people to.
• Articulate plan for this other user for Cosmo (hacker person running Cosmo) and figure out how that fits into the strategy post Beta.
• We need to address the tension on Cosmo between the 2 possible target users (small group collaborator end user, person installing and running the server).
• Does cross-platform apply to Cosmo?

Session Notes