So, someone asked me the first good question about the vision for Bongo. To paraphrase, why am I against using the word groupware?
The easy historical answer is that it was almost the rallying call for Hula, and the groupware bad essay by jwz expressed this quite neatly in some ways. But that's not a very good 'why' answer.
For me, the difference is probably quite slight in some respects, but it comes down to who we design features for. Do we design them for people, or do we design them for groups / teams / organisations? In my opinion, the answer has to be that you design for individual people.
A good example of a feature which I don't think is person-oriented is "Read receipts" on e-mails. For those who haven't seen it - and I can't believe there are many - the idea is that by setting a read receipt on an e-mail, the person you e-mail sends you a signal back when they've opened the mail. In some software, that signal goes back automatically, in others a dialog comes up, sometimes it's a setting that controls the behaviour.
From having seen how some businesses operate with regards to receipts, I can't think of another feature which induces complete communication avoidance in people: I know people who are actively afraid of opening their e-mail lest they accidentally read something and inadvertantly tell someone they've read it, implying that they're "actioning" the e-mail. Total loss of control over their time. (You can make similar criticisms of Blackberries too, I believe)
The basic issue with giving too much visibility into someone else's data is that you get that Big Brother mentality, which if it doesn't actually exist will certainly exist in the minds of the more paranoid members of an organisation. It's almost like having your boss stand over your shoulder watching you work.
Are there examples of features I think ought to be in Bongo, but might not appear in "groupware"? Possibly. It seems to me that the aim of groupware generally seems to be to suck people in online, whereas software which is about communication, time management, etc., is actually about getting people offline. Putting in work-flow which manages more of people's work in a groupware system seems to me to be totally the wrong answer, particularly where you have to have "group acceptance" for things to work properly: "Oh, you changed the meeting online to 3pm? We agreed it would be 4pm at the last meeting...". Bongo would never assume that everyone else is using Bongo in the way that Exchange divides people between "Users" and "Everyone else".
There's no really easy way of expressing this, and I don't think that there is a bright-line test for this either. In many ways, Bongo will be groupware, or be usable in the same way, and it will have most of the same features. But I think the focus has to be on the individual, and providing tools for an individual to use, not attempting to mold a team into a specific set of processes.
Of course, that could all still be "groupware". We're just redefining what groupware means :)
posted at: 15:15 | path: /bongo/community | permanent link to this entry
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.
posted at: 14:16 | path: /bongo/community | permanent link to this entry
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 :)
posted at: 22:33 | path: /bongo/community | permanent link to this entry
From Friday until late Monday night, I will be on retreat and entirely away from the internet. No, Bongo hasn't scared me off, I will be back :) So, I figure that I'm going to try again my "pretty please" act to get people to look at some bugs: it worked great last time I tried it, and I can't remember why I didn't try again. Of course, many people won't feel competent enough to look at some of these bugs, so there's an extra-credit task at the end of this coming up in a further blog post :)
I'll likely drop back in on Monday night, but I won't otherwise have internet from tomorrow onwards, so don't expect me to be around (except that my irc client will probably stay logged in, but away). See you all then!
posted at: 17:19 | path: /bongo/community | permanent link to this entry
(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!
posted at: 09:17 | path: /bongo/community | permanent link to this entry
It has taken a while for the paperwork and stuff to work through, and I'm sure people who followed the discussion on our mailing lists will have almost entirely forgotten about this by now - but today's big news is that Bongo is now officially a member of the Software Freedom Conservancy. This is strangely exciting - it's another step forward for our project which re-affirms our commitment to what we're trying to achieve.
Being part of the Conservancy will make it clearer to everyone that we're dedicated to a free software stack. Indeed, if we did anything non-free, we would probably get thrown out, since it would jepardise the tax status of the overall organisation.
We're also going to be under the same umbrella as some seriously cool free software projects: Samba are a well known member, but the related OpenChange project (attempting to implement the Microsoft MAPI mail APIs) is also there - and the Conservancy strongly encourages its member projects to interact and help each other.
In terms of what you can expect from the project and how it operates, basically nothing will change: it puts our project on some kind of official legal footing, being part of a US 501(c)(3) organisation, but the project will continue to operate as it has done. Pat Felt and I are the contacts with the SFC itself, but that is really an administrative thing.
It does mean that we can accept tax-deductible donations from Americans now. At some point, I will set up a donations link on the website, which will allow any one to send some money our way. I'm not under much illusion that we'll be getting much any time soon, but it will be interesting to see what happens. Having a little money about would actually help a great deal - for example, membership of standards organisations like CalConnect (who run a CalDav interoperability workshop each year) would cost Bongo a minimum of 00 annually. Realistically, if we wanted to send developers to a workshop, we'd actually be talking about double that or more. Getting sponsorship for that is well within the realms of possibility, and that's the kind of thing I see us spending money on.
If you have any other questions about our membership of the Conservancy, please drop me a line either privately or on the lists.
posted at: 10:03 | path: /bongo/community | permanent link to this entry
I noticed "boycott novell" made mention of Bongo today - they mistook our M3 release as the announcement of the project - but nice to see another mention in a new place. I'd like to comment slightly on the Yahoo! situation, though.
The boycott site is quite wrong when it talks of "pulling a Hula": Hula was never sold because it was competitive to Microsoft Exchange. Anyone who was involved with the project, or used Hula (it's still available in Ubuntu!), would know that's not the case. But, unintentionally, there is a point there: the fact is, Microsoft could/would be in a position of owning two groupware systems, which is similar to the position Novell found themselves in (actually, not as bad, because Novell originally had three ;).
If Microsoft do take over Yahoo! (and that doesn't seem certain to me, yet), they will be in the position of effectively having two products in the same basic market twice over - Exchange and Zimbra, and MSN Mail (or whatever it is - Hotmail?) and Yahoo! Mail. And for the most part, a business selling two products which do the same thing ends up doing not much more than confusing its customers.
My guess: First, Yahoo! Mail will get merged into the Microsoft version, somehow. I'm sure the UIs will be slowly aligned, and then people switched over without realising it.
Zimbra is a tougher call, though. I don't expect them to kill it. However, I also don't see them keeping it - if I was to guess, I would say Zimbra would get spun out into a standalone company. I don't think Microsoft is going to want to piss off a good number of customers, I don't think it will want to keep Zimbra, and I don't think those customers want Exchange. So the obvious answer to me is, get rid.
However, in that scenario, it may well end up a bit like Hula - the people involved in the "open source" side of the software may effectively find themselves in a whole new world they didn't expect themselves to be in. Whenever you have a software project that has a single corporate sponsor (if you will), you are always in that situation, because that type of sponsorship has to be continually justified.
In virtually all ways, this doesn't affect Bongo: if those people using Zimbra right now have to change (and I'm not at all convinced they'd have to), I'd say they are more likely to jump to Exchange than Bongo. But, I sure feel a lot of compassion for the situation: with two disparate communities (commercial users and open source users, in this case with slightly different products) there is always going to be one side which "loses out" somehow.
posted at: 22:03 | path: /bongo/community | permanent link to this entry
We're probably going to see 0.3 this week. I'm planning on releasing 0.2.94 today, at which point we'll be back on SVN trunk, and then 0.3 sometime by the weekend. There are going to be a few known bugs not fixed, but it won't be in terrible state by any means.
I've just realised that there's going to be a lot of Bongo in the community over the next few months. We don't have an events page on the wiki - someone needs to fix that! - but just to run-down through them:
So, that's five meetings across three different continents in the next three months: no excuses! I'm expecting photos and/or videos from each of these events :)
posted at: 08:46 | path: /bongo/community | permanent link to this entry
We all have New Year's resolutions in some form or another; I haven't really got mine straight in my head yet but there are a couple of things I'm committing to over the next month or two - one of which is to spend more time regularly hacking Bongo. I had hoped to get some hacking in over Christmas; family events overtook that and as a result I've spent virtually no time on Bongo at all. So, my immediate goals are:
Border suggested that one of us write up a kind of look back over our first year, as well as a look ahead - Pat did a little bit of that, but I do feel the need to take stock in more measured fashion. One goal I set which we totally haven't achieved is releasing often, and I think my main goal with Bongo this year is to do that: if I achieve nothing else, making steady, perhaps reliable, but recognisable progress I think is going to be very important to this project.
In other news, my Bongo hacking time today has been spent in a couple of ways. I've been getting my builds warmed up again - somehow they always bit-rot and there are things to fix - and I've been and renewed the project's domain name. Somehow there were only four days left on it, ho hum.
posted at: 19:35 | path: /bongo/community | permanent link to this entry
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.
posted at: 19:15 | path: /bongo/community | permanent link to this entry