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announce-admin | 2 Apr 2003 02:40
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OSAF receives $98,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

OSAF is pleased to announce that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has agreed
to provide a $98,000 grant to fund a planning project to extend OSAF's
Chandler software application to meet the information technology needs of
higher education.

We originally planned for Chandler to target individual and small-to-medium
business users that need a better tool to manage and share their email,
contacts, calendars and notes. Based on expressions of significant interest
from the higher education community, OSAF, with support of the Mellon
Foundation, is undertaking a study of how to address administration
scalability, and security issues of that segment.

We are still focused on our original target of supporting small-to-medium
groups in a decentralized fashion.  However, if it looks feasible and we are
able secure the funding, OSAF would create the Chandler functionality
required by higher education institutions to work with campus computing
infrastructure and requirements.  Whether this would be done via a single
version of Chandler or two separate versions is still to be determined.  Our
investigation into the higher educational requirements has already led us to
improve our initial architecture design to improve robustness and
scalability in centralized and decentralized environments alike.

You can see the announcement on the OSAF
website(http://www.osafoundation.org/MellonAnnouncement_Mar-31-2003.htm)

Pieter Hartsook
Marketing Specialist
Open Software Applications Foundation

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announce-admin | 4 Apr 2003 01:38
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OSAF Status Update No. 3


The third status update can be found on the wiki at:  
http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Main/UpdateNumber3.

I've also attached it below, although the formatting isn't as nice.

Mitchell

Status Update #3 -- April 3, 2003

It's been a while since the last report, as I was traveling for a bit.  
There's a lot going on at OSAF these days.

1.  0.1 Release

We've continued to work on the upcoming 0.1 release, which is described 
in the 
[[http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Main/ZeroPointOneRelease][0.1 
docs]] I posted a while back, and also in Mitch's recent blog postings  
[http://blogs.osafoundation.org/mitch/]. We think we've got most of the 
basic parcel functionality pulled together, but there is still a chunk 
of work to do to get it ready to release. 

We've arranged for Mitch and Andy to give a presentation 
[http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2003/view/e_sess/4340] at the 
O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference at the end of April, and for 
OSAF staff to do a Birds of a Feather session 
[http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2003/view/e_sess/4349].   We're 
also planning to hold a series of online chat sessions after the 0.1 
release to answer questions and be generally available.  Ducky Sherwood
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announce-admin | 22 Apr 2003 00:29
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Chandler 0.1 available immediately

It gives me great pleasure to announce the first release of Chandler, 
release 0.1!  While we are still very early in the design and 
implementation process, we intend for this 0.1 release to make us a more 
fully open project.  We have made the release available for download, 
opened up our bug tracking database, and opened our source code 
repository.  We have also spent quite a bit of time in the past few weeks 
focusing on improving our code and documentation.

We are focusing first on architectural issues, not end-user features, yet 
there are some interesting things to look at in this release.  In 
particular, the outlines of the Chandler peer-to-peer sharing framework are 
visible.  There are also the very crude beginnings of a calendar and 
contact manager to play with.

We haven't begun to focus on a polished user interface, the current user 
interface is a placeholder. So rest assured that future releases will bring 
dramatic improvement in this area as well.

The 0.1 release does have a fair amount of the framework for writing 
"viewer parcels" -- plug-ins that can be added to Chandler extremely 
easily.  In fact, two of our sample viewer parcels were written by OSAF 
team members who were not hired as programmers and who were completely 
unfamiliar with the tools.

In future releases, we will improve both the architectural framework and 
user experience significantly, with a short-term emphasis on  novel 
features over robustness or well-understood features.  We need to 
incorporate our original features as early as possible so that we can 
explore their implications, and we need to make it as easy as possible to 
implement those original features.
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Gmane