Well, I’m sorry to announce that my prediction was about right: we didn’t get into this year’s Summer of Code. From what I’ve seen, this year was extremely competitive, and many good projects didn’t get in.

It looks like only one project similar to us got in was OSAF/Chandler – they are a returning project, so that’s not a huge surprise. They have some nice looking Javascript ideas which I don’t think are very applicable to us, sadly, but who knows. They also have a natural language parsing idea which was something I wanted us to do, so I need to investigate what they have and what they’re doing.. I hope they’re doing it for international languages, but we’ll see.

I’m also really happy to see that some of our sister projects at the Conservancy got in – Mercurial and OpenChange, as well as the Software Freedom Law Center itself. It’s also nice to see that a number of projects aren’t simply technical challenges, but software supporting people working on some of the toughest problems in the world: poverty, illness, education, that kind of thing.

Leslie offered feedback to projects, but unfortunately wasn’t able to say too much to me: her response was roughly, “Another example of not enough space: good ideas, good docs, but we can’t take everyone.” In a way, I’m glad: I did everything I could to give Bongo the best chance, and one year our number will come up. Again, she asked that we apply again next year, and I have some ideas about how to improve our application even further: it will need more preparation, but I think we’re almost there in terms of getting selected. We just need that final push to make us irresistable somehow

My best wishes to everyone in the Bongo community for the year ahead. I’m sorry not to have been around much over the holiday; our family lost our Grandmother four days ago, and as you might imagine things have been a bit upside down since. One minute I was committing a patch for new mail processing, the next I was in hospital (almost literally), and things have been a bit strange since.

After that, Bongo hacking has actually come as a bit of a light relief, so it would be cool to hear if anyone has tried out the maildir’d store, and if things are looking good, we can think about releasing relatively soon I think.

So, this is the extra task I alluded to in my last blog post, but don’t let that put you off!

I’d love to hear from people about how they use Bongo now, and how they want to use Bongo in the future. Especially, I’d like to hear from people who are watching this project but not participating more directly. So, to that end, I’ve kicked off a discussion on the forum: Where do you (want to) use Bongo?

There is no burning reason behind this, but I’d really like to have an idea of where people see the software being useful, and in what scenarios they’d think about deploying it. It’s fine to say “I’m waiting for (X crucial feature)”, and it’s not likely to make me work on that crucial feature because they’re different for everyone , but I’d really like to hear what kind of organisation you’re in, or what tasks you’d want to use Bongo for, or why you’re not happy with your current system.

Everyone can contribute to the forums, so no excuses! There are no right or wrong answers, and I imagine everyone will have a different reason. I’ve posted mine, so please post yours

Within this post, I mention the B-word (business) a few times. Don’t let this put you off, please

One thing I’ve noticed when meeting up with other free software users and developers is that a strikingly high proportion of them are involved in business in some way: either owner/managers of their own small business, or having a key role in one. Not most of them by any means, but a much higher proportion than any other group of people I meet (which perhaps says more about the company I keep – I don’t know!). People who are involved with business will know that occasionally you do less day-to-day stuff and think more strategically – at least, I’m told that’s what you’re supposed to do – and the one I’m involved in is no exception. Part of this strategic thinking is revisiting the vision of the business(es).

So, I’m preparing for this meeting this evening, and I’m finding some of my tasks for this meeting pretty tough. “Blue sky thinking” is pretty hard, if you want to do it right: you can think up all sorts of ideas, but not matter how grand sounding they are, they can easily sound hollow and meaningless. As an example, Microsoft’s vision statement is (or was, I can’t find it on their site) “A computer in every home”. Not, “To sell lots of copies of Windows” or “Provide powerful software to let users to more” – neither of those statements is as meaningful, emotional, or as motivational. And no matter what your opinion of Microsoft, they’re coming pretty close to achieving their vision, at least for the western world.

There’s plenty of other examples. You don’t have to be a business, either – I’m told Tiger Woods has a vision statement. Again, not “A very good golfer”, or “Win many tournaments”, or even “Be the number one golfer in the world”. His is (allegedly) “Be the best golfer ever”. If that’s not a vision, I don’t know what is.

Getting back vaguely on topic. I’m finding these tasks tough, as I mentioned before. So, I’m thinking, maybe it would be easier to think about developing some for Bongo? It’s easier in a way, because it’s much more specific, so I got to thinking, and this is what I’ve come up with.

Vision statement: Be the recognised benchmark for personal collaborative software.

This is slightly wishy-washy, and could use improvement. What I mean by this is basically this: in the same way Word sets the benchmark for wordprocessing, and Apache does for web serving, Bongo should set the standard for collaboration, and be recognised by name for that. By “personal collaborative software” I’m kind of grasping around a little bit, because I don’t want to say (and don’t mean) “groupware”. I mean personal tools which enable you to organise yourself and co-ordinate with others: power over your inbox, over your calendar, and your contacts. The word “personal” in there is important I think: we’re centred around people.

Mission statement: The Project creates standards-based software for managing personal communications and organisational information, accessible online and from the desktop, aimed at small office / home office type users. Bongo is adaptable and versatile, while maintaining simplicity and usability, so people can use as many or as few of its features as they are interested in. The user experience is integrated, and doesn’t offer simply the “lowest common denominator” or “most interoperable” functionality at the cost of user productivity. Bongo will continue to be completely free software.

This is more wordy, but is more about “this is how we will achieve our vision”. Arguably, the scope of userbase I’ve offered above isn’t enough to achieve the vision, but we can always revisit this again in the future

Culture and values: Bongo is the friendliest project on earth, and offers a uniquely accessible community of development. We aim for technical excellence and practicality while having fun developing the software.

We’ve actually said something a bit like this before: in the contributor agreement, I specifically wrote in from the beginning that friendliness was crucial. I’m not sure I needed to write it; I’ve never needed to remind people of it, and we have a community which has never suffered a flamewar, which is really great.

Now, none of the above is set in stone in any way – this is purely a personal exercise for me at the moment But, I don’t see why we can’t adopt something like the above – I think it will tell people a lot more about what our project is trying to do. So, feel free to discuss this in the forums or on the mailing list, and if you know of any free software/open source projects who’ve already adopted a vision or mission statement, please let me know – I did search around and couldn’t see anything.

Well, it was last weekend, but I meant to write about it before now. It was nice to have probably the biggest meet-up of Bongo Project contributors that has ever happened, and Project polo shirts are now in the hands of everyone. The weekend was mostly spent looking through the talk schedule (some of which was interesting, some of which was less so), wondering if Nat was going to say anything about Hula, and chatting about Bongo – we didn’t go to too many talks, but the Selenium one was probably worth the weekend alone.

It felt like a smaller event this year, and I thought WUSU was a better venue – I like the Lighthouse a lot, but it’s not really suitable for talks: the cinema is fine, but the atrium isn’t good. I also really, really wish there was some kind of community lounge: the various stands are great, but I don’t think they encourage interaction. Less formal tables with chairs/sofas, and the ability to form ad-hoc groups (which happened with the cafe’s furniture anyway) would be really, really cool. But, all that said, I enjoyed the event and it was very worthwhile.

The Bongo BOF happened on the Sunday, quite late. Even though the BOF point is a bit out of the way, and there were other interesting things happening, we got some very interested people coming over, some of whom couldn’t stay long but were very enthusiastic about what we’re doing. I was hoping to do some multimedia stuff, which we didn’t really get time to do, but it’s perhaps for the best – it needs better planning, really.

Finally, the BOF photo – by this point, only one non-Bongo person was still there:

From the left, that’s Jonny Lamb, Chris Lamb, myself, Lance Haig, a participant whose name I didn’t catch (but I think is Lee), and Andrew Wafaa.

I’m hoping that we can all get back together again for LinuxWorld in London, happening on the 23^rd-24^th October this year. I’m thinking by this point we’re going to be getting reasonably close to 1.0, which should mean it’s a very exciting time, and Mr Hixon has also intimated that we might be able to persuade him to join us from Oz, which would be incredible.

(What are we to call them? I’ll stick with MoMsg for now I think)

Welcome to the planned MailCo, whose name has been revealed as Mozilla Messaging Inc.. This has been in the pipeline for a little while, and it doesn’t seem to be quite ready yet, but it seems they’re almost there.

I think this will be news to a lot of people – Bryan Clark tells us on his blog he only waved goodbye to RedHat yesterday – but it’s best that things go forward pretty quickly in my opinion. If anything, MoMsg needs to get going yesterday: Thunderbird 2 has been out a long time now, and Firefox 3 is just around the corner. Getting Thunderbird 3 out of the door very quickly ought to be a priority.

The track record in this area isn’t great. Other organisations have had seed funding, great ideas, engineers on board and haven’t produced – I wouldn’t want to see the next “Dreaming in Code” be about Mozilla – and I’m slightly surprised that for a commercial organisation, they only seem to have hackers on the payroll at this point. But, very early days yet: I’m very excited that they are looking to put calendaring features into Thunderbird directly (Lightning as a plugin is great, but it does feel like a bolt-on).

So, best of British to all those at MoMsg – I really look forward to seeing what you produce!