Westwood Advisory Council Members:

Here are some background materials in preparation for the May 6 meeting.

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Stuff to do before the meeting:

Reminder #1:

Review current logistics and agenda information on WestwoodAdvisoryCouncilMeeting20040506Agenda

Reminder #2:

Should you have additional suggestions for Agenda Items e-mail them to hartsook@osafoundation.org or use the edit-button under the Agenda Items Table and simply add them to the Wiki page for the meeting

Reminder #3:

Review the Attendee List. If you are going to attend via phone, or if a substitute will be taking your place, please use the edit button under the table to update the Attendee List Table to reflect this.

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Review: A brief summary of what's been going on at OSAF since the last WAC meeting in January:

Chandler Release 0.3

We released Chandler 0.3 on February 26. Release 0.3 targets developers who want an early preview into our architecture as we are developing it. With this release we now can begin to encourage open source developers to work with the OSAF core development team.

The two biggest architecture advancements in this release are the Repository and the Chandler Presentation and Interaction Architecture (CPIA). In 0.3 our Repository is much more robust and scalable and now implements a transaction and threading model. This release also marks the debut of CPIA, which is a UI layer in our architecture that is uniquely adapted for item-centric applications based on our Repository. Not only does it abstract away implementation-specific UI widgets, but CPIA elements have direct access to our Repository via data-driven queries.

• You can find out more about the 0.3 release at: ChandlerZeroPointThreeReadme
• You can download the 0.3 release for Linux, MacOS, and Windows from: http://downloads.osafoundation.org/chandler/releases/0.3/
• You can see an evaluation of some of the community involvement surrounding the 0.3 release at: EvaluationDataZeroPointThreeMar2004

With this release the underlying data store, the Chandler Repository was finally stable enough that we began to encourage community participation in some development tasks. The first case was the Pycon 2004 conference in Washington DC where Mitch gave a keynote speech and Ted Leung and Jeffrey Harris conducted a 4-day Chandler programming sprint to work on Repository backup and restore functions. The experience was particularly useful in raising our awareness about what we need to do to make contributions by the volunteer community easier and more rewarding for both the volunteers and OSAF. Some notes from participants in the Sprint can be found at: PyconSprintSummary

As development of Chandler proceeds, we want to encourage more participation from the open source community. Because of CSG's vested interest in Chandler it seems likely that the institutions would want to get involved with hands-on development. As an agenda item in the May WAC meeting we would like to raise the issue: How can CSG promote and facilitate engineering contributions from the institutions?

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OSAF Staffing

We have made progress in our hiring plan. New employees who have been hired since the January meeting include:

• Mark Jaffe, as Release Engineer, Mark is responsible for the build and release distribution processes for Chandler.
• Brian Kirsch is the "go to" person for making email happen in Chandler. This includes everything from an architectural role in deciding how to integrate email to evaluating existing code for communicating with e-mail servers, making fix/build decisions, and hooking these to the networking and data repository frameworks.
• David Surovell joins OSAF as the GUI Frameworks software engineer including platform-specific UI component integration through wxWidgets.
• Lisa Dusseault is a Development Manager and OSAF's standards architect. Lisa has been an active IETF contributor on various Internet applications protocols for eight years now and will continue to do this kind of work at OSAF. She chairs the XMPP <http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/xmpp-charter.html> (Jabber <http://www.jabber.org/ietf>) and WebDAV <http://www.webdav.org/> Working Groups, and is co-chair of the IETF IMAP extensions Working Group <http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/imapext-charter.html>
• Donn Denman joins OSAF staff as a software design engineer focusing on the Chandler Presentation and Interaction Architecture (CPIA). Donn was a member of the original Macintosh development team during his 14 years at Apple. After some years working on settop boxes for the 3DO company and PowerTV^? he has decided to come back to the Desktop world by joining OSAF to work on the CPIA portion of Chandler.

TBH: We are still in the process of interviewing for a QA engineer.

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Chandler Roadmap

After the release of 0.3 we did a thorough debriefing and analysis to fine tune our 0.4 release plans. As of mid-April we are finishing up the 0.4 planning process and should have an update to the Canoga/Westwood roadmap and schedule to report at the WAC meeting. You can review the current state of the development process and in particular the development goals for 0.4 at:

• DevelopmentHome
• ProjectOverviewTable2005

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Liberal Arts Colleges Survey

Scott Siddall conducted an online survey of the NITLE schools to gather some of the same kinds of information we had collected from the CSG institutions. Although OSAF has not invested as much effort in communicating with the NITLE schools as we have with CSG, the response rate for the survey was quite high indicating a fair amount of interest. Scott will be presenting a summary of the survey results at the meeting.

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Chandler Security Plans

Heikki Toivonen has been working on the security architecture for Projects. You can review our current approach on the Wiki at: SecurityFramework . Heikki will give a presentation on our current security design at the meeting.

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Pieter Hartsook

Marketing Specialist Open Source Applications Foundation