On Nov 30, 2005, at 12:09 PM, Sheila Mooney wrote:
As many of you are aware the work on our 0.6 usable calendar is winding down and the planning for the next release is now ramping up. There have already been a number of discussions regarding the right priorities and tenets for 0.7. We would like to open up this discussion to a much broader audience and get people's thoughts and comments on what our priorities should be in 0.7.
In order to provide some context for the discussion I wanted to summarize the proposed tenets on the table for 0.7 and some of the issues/tradeoffs we are wrestling with.
Proposed Tenets:
-> Dogfood Sharing/Calendar #2 - Move the calendar towards feature complete by adding features like free-busy. Respond to bug fixes and/or enhancements that block calendar usability as users discover them.
-> Plausible Dashboard - Basic working table with sort, search and UI polish as well as infrastructure to lay foundation for innovative PIM features around task and project management.
-> Application Infrastructure - Continued work on performance, widgets, undo framework.
-> Developer Platform - Schema upgrade, content model as well as refactoring and documenting APIs that 3rd party developers can use. This includes work refactoring CPIA.
-> Release Packaging - now that some portion of the product is usable, investing more time to enable users to download and run Chandler on all 3 platforms. In particular, distribute via conventional means on Linux distributions.
I'm fine with these tenets.
Questions/Issues:
-> How much calendar work do we do? Do we focus on bugs fixes or tackle new features such as free-busy? How do we bound this tenet around a clear goal so we can prioritize the work?
How much we end up doing is dependent on how many of the tenets we adopt. If we want to make progress on all of them, then that will bound the amount of work that we can do on any particular one.
-> Should we be considering PDA sync or is that out of the question for 0.7?
Lack of a PDA story makes us a non-starter for a lot of people. The problem is that there is probably no good cross platform way to do this. It seems to me that the shortest path involves seeing if we could write import/export plugins that could talk to platform native services (such as Sync Services on OS X) which already know how to talk to PDAs.
-> How much email work should we do in 0.7 and what are the consequences of delaying this further? There is some email work planning to support of the dashboard tenet what happens if we have to make some tough choices and don't do this?
We need to learn how to develop more than one application area at a time. If we are only able to focus on on application area per release, then we are never going to finish. I think that it is pretty important to make some progress on e-mail in 0.7.
-> What do we really mean by plausible dashboard? If we do the basic table work, what other aspects of the dashboard and task management features do we need to add in order for us iterate and get some valuable user feedback on some of these designs?
-> Should we focus on trying to have a shorter release than 0.6 by doing less? Maybe we have 2 short releases instead of one?
The advantage of shorter releases is that there are more opportunities for us to get feedback. There are also more sync points which can be helpful when you need to co-ordinate with another project, like Cosmo. The disadvantage is that we do more work to qualify and do the release endgame. While I am glad for all the work that we have accomplished in 0.6, I would have preferred two releases closer together. However, I also think that we didn't have the resources to pull that off, without further impacts to the schedule.
-> What is appropriate to tackle in the infrastructure tenet and what could be deferred? Undo? ACLs?
We cannot defer work on performance. We have made large improvements in 0.6, but we are still short of our original 3000 item goals for 0.6. Compared to our eventual goal of 10 years worth of a person's personal information, we are unfortunately quite far off.
I view Undo as part of the refactoring work on CPIA.
I didn't see ACL's in the infrastructure tenet. Unless they are in there to support 0.7 sharing functionality (or the work needs to start now in order to be ready for 0.8), then I think we should defer.
I realize some of these tenets are very high-level and it's hard for people to comment on the dashboard when we are still trying to determine what that is for 0.7. The goal of this exercise is less about debating the details and more about getting some feedback from those close to the project about what features or areas of the app, they feel we should be working on (ie: building out innovative features like the dashboard or getting to a usable email client).
We must learn to walk and chew gum at the same time. Our goal is not just a calendar, not just an e-mail client, not just a task list, not just a contact manager, but something that encompasses all of these.
It's tough to think about 0.7 without some context for the larger product roadmap so I have included a link to our latest "1.0 stickie plan" (view in firefox) which is a possible scenario for getting to a usable product in the 1.0 timeframe. This is a work in progress will be evolving with every dot release but we wanted to give folks a sense of where certain features fall on the roadmap that are NOT part of the 0.7 tenets. This demonstrates how we see certain application areas evolving in the product life-cycle.
Comments on the tenets, issues or new questions for us to ponder are all welcome. Based on all the feedback we receive, the product team will make the final decisions on the 0.7 tenets, taking into account all the various comments. Please send all replies to the design list.
We need to begin to find ways to attract people outside of OSAF to help us. It's not just that we want to be "a good open source project". We need the help.
