Well, I"m finally back in the saddle after a week at OSAF. It was five months since my last visit, which was probably a little too long. Some of the things that I talked about this week included several meetings on Item Clouds, a long clarifying discussion on our Data Model, and several discussions on Item Sharing. Anthony Baxter dropped by to tell us about shtoom, encourage us to think about voice in Chandler and suggest some ways to get more involved with the python community, so I suppose I'll forgive him for greeting me by telling me that I looked like ****. It was also a good time to be around to accelerate the coordination needed for planning the 0.4 release, and since we've hired a number of new folks, it was good to meet all of them, and spend some time developing existing relationships.

This trip I also managed to have an active evening social calendar. I spent one evening with our old family friends David and Katherine Fedor. It's been entirely too long since I saw them -- hopefully we'll be able to get the families together sometime soon. I spent another evening with fellow Brownies David Temkin and Sarah Allen who are both at Laszlo. David and I worked on Newton together, and it was interesting to hear his reflections on the project now that a number of years have passed.

I also ended up spending an evening with Marc Canter, his wife Lisa, and Phil Wolff. Marc is doing a bunch of open source style projects in addition to his consulting with various companies in the social software space. A lot of what he's doing right now centers around FOAF, and I'm looking forward to seeing the results soon. I think that there could be a nice tie in between the PeopleAggregator and Chandler's "sharing circles". One thing that Marc's interested in is being able to build another user interface on top of Chandler functionality. If we do a good job at MVC in CPIA, then this shouldn't be that much labor. Something that struck me as I talked with Marc was the long term view that he's taking of the stuff that he's working on. He's thinking multiple years worth of effort, a point of view that's been in short supply / disfavor since the dot com boom and "internet time".

Phil Wolff has gotten a fair amount of reading in our house -- he's hit both my and Julie's aggregator. In fact, when I told Julie I was meeting Phil too, she exclaimed "the thousand beers guy". You never know what will stick... Phil's been doing a lot of work with the Kerry campaign, and thinking about the issues related to taking the software artifacts created by campaigns and making sure that they have a life so that succeeding elections/campaigns could make use of them. He also asked me some interesting questions about Chandler. How will Chandler compete with a "Google in a box" appliance that includes search, e-mail, etc? How will Chandler do calendar support for events like Muslim prayers which occur a sunrise and sunset in your current location? This requires knowing where you are in the world so that you can compute when sunrise and sunset are. Food for thought, indeed. Phil had two thought provoking posts earlier that day, one on the 'Perfect' Corporate Weblogging 'Elevator Pitch' Competition (which he is judging) and another on social network software.

Lisa, Marc, and Phil got me the last night I was in town, and by then I was slightly draggy (I didn't say that Anthony was wrong), so I hope that I was suitably interesting company.