Re: [Design] 0.7 Planning (Reframing the issue.)

[Alec Flett]

Ted Leung wrote: 3. How would a family use it to keep track of vacations, school holidays, doctor's appointments and school activities? We are actually doing this at home now via iCal and a behind the firewall webdav server.  I have a calendar and Julie has a calendar.  We both subscribe to each other's calendars and to the OSAF office calendar (so she knows my meeting schedule).   I think this surfaces a bit of a weakness (at least from what I've seen) of our sharing-centric view on calendars. My impression has been (and if I'm wrong, that's fine - but if its the impression I got it might be related to the shared understanding of chandler at OSAF) that chandler sharing was so that I could share my calendar with others, or so that a group calendar (like the office calendar) could be shared by multiple people. I think that actually I'm unlikely to really want to share my calendar with others. I probably just want them to be able to see when I'm available. But anyhow, what struck me was that Julie needs to subscribe to Ted's office calendar.. that seems somewhat broken. Instead, Ted needs to decide, for himself, which of the events on the office calendar are actually part of his daily activities, and somehow incorporate those into his personal calendar. But honestly I'm not sure how close we are with Chandler here, probably because I don't understand the intended workflow. When Julie goes to find free time on Ted's calendar, she may or may not see all of the events on his personal calendar, but in any case she can see free/busy, and can thus find out when he's free. Further, she shouldn't NEED to subscribe to his calendar to see free/busy information. I'm imagining the nightmare the sidebar would become if I needed to subscribe to the calendars of the other 20 people at osaf just to schedule a meeting with them! Obviously this is demonstrating the value of a good Free/Busy implementation but I think the other thing at least I need to understand is the relationship between shared and personal calendars, how that relates to Free/Busy, etc. And then finally, lets say Julie finds time on Ted's calendar.. how does she actually indicate to ted that she wants to get together? Does she put the event on ted's calendar for the next time he syncs on his end? Does she put it on hers and tell him to go add it to his? Here we get to the value of invitations... So is there a workflow where you can have invitations without free/busy, or one where free/busy is useful without invitations? Alec I also subscribe to a few other calendars.  If our kids were in school, I would want to have a calendar of school events/holidays that I could subscribe to.  It's not hard to imagine that at some point, each child will have their own calendar.  You can go quite far just being able to overlay calendars, because you can see when there are conflicts.      Coordinating events has the flavor of: "We want to do x together" when can we do it.   Right now that's a manual process, which we usually coordinate either verbally or via e-mail.   We also have events that we do with groups of friends and it would be great to be able to coordinate with them.   It is annoying to have things like evites, which live outside of the calendar world, because it means pointless copying and pasting of data. As far as features: I use PDA sync, but Julie does not, although I may be persuading her to adopt this.  Invitations or another mechanism to help streamline the negotiation process wold be a help. The ability to find open holes, and the ability to do so with friends outside the family is probably the feature that would make the biggest difference.  Of course, that would require our friends to use CalDAV enabled clients. In our case, neither is a showstopper. And within the context of these real-life scenarios, what are features we absolutely have to have to meet the bar of use-fulness? To put it another way, can we imagine that there are users out there who could use Chandler in ways that wouldn't require free-busy? pda sync? invitations? OR Can we imagine that there are users out there who would be happy ot use Chandler with bare minimum versions of some of these features? I think there are people specifically saying that "just seeing free time for even just a subset of the people I need to coordinate with" would be very useful. It's useful until you find out that the person whose free time you didn't see can't make the meeting.   Seeing free time versus not is a big step up, because if I can see everybody's freetime, then I can manually do the free/busy match.  It's not as nice as doing it automatically, but at least I can do it.  I'm coming to the office next week, and not having visibility into people's free time is the cause of multi-message e-mail threads. And finally, given that there is no equivalent of iCal on the PC, could we imagine that since we have all the features iCal does (minus a few bugs and custom reminders) PLUS a whole lot more, let me repeat that louder, PLUS A WHOLE LOT MORE. Can we imagine that we can get a lot of PC users without doing ANY new features? Not meaning to beat a dead horse, but iCal syncs to pdas and we don't.  So in that one area, we are behind.  That aside, I agree that we are ahead.  For people who have the same level of scheduling needs as me, I'd say we don't need that many new calendar features.  What we do need is snappy performance, and the ability to say, yes, you can put your data in it an we won't eat it.  As long as data might go away, its going to be hard to get people outside of the tinkerer/hacker/very early adopter group. If we were a bit snappier on the Mac, and we could take off the data loss scariness, and we resolved the issues w/ cosmo-demo, then I could deploy at home to replace iCal, at least for our family, which is all we are doing now. (One last thing, when we say, get more users, what do we mean by that? 100? 1000? 10,000?) Depends on how you look at the phasing.    As long as we have the data warning, I think we are talking low 100's to sub 100's who will use the calendar the way we intend to dogfood it at OSAF.  I am of course, just pulling that number out of a hat. That was original theory at the end of 0.5, that the bar was much lower for calendar and that by just doing iCal for PC, we would get users. If we are just looking at the calendar, I don't think that the barriers to small workgroup level adoption are in calendar features, useful though they might be. ---- Ted Leung                 Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF) PGP Fingerprint: 1003 7870 251F FA71 A59A  CEE3 BEBA 2B87 F5FC 4B42 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Open Source Applications Foundation "Design" mailing list http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/design

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