Mitch Kapor’s Blog

Meetingboarding: (n) the sensation of being unable to breathe arising from continuous immersion in meeting after meeting

On Feb 22, 2008, at 5:40 PM, Xxxxx Yyyyy wrote:

Dear Mitch: I would like to meet with you to discuss Zzzzzzz, an early stage social networking website for KKKKKK.

I’d like your advice on:
1) Fund-raising
2) Partnering with other companies/individuals

We’re based in Silicon Valley. When would be a good time to meet for 30 mins?

Dear Xxxxx,

I’m not interested in this.

Have you considered that some people, myself included, are offended by the presumptive close technique you employ, when you ask when would be a good time to meet? You’re presuming that the issue on the table is when I want to meet, not whether I want to meet at all. If I wanted to answer in kind, I would say: “How about never? Does never work for you?”. But I’m not that rude.

– mitch

After six and a half years, I’m going to be ending my involvement with the Open Source Applications Foundation and the Chandler project. OSAF and Chandler will continue, as led by the extremely able Katie Parlante. You can read the official announcement on the Chandler Project blog.

When I conceived of the project in 2001, I had high aspirations for an innovative Personal Information Manager built around an open source model. We invited Scott Rosenberg, who was embarking on a book about why software is hard to make, to be an embedded journalist on our journey. His account of OSAF’s formative years, Dreaming in Code, captures the big vision as well as the many struggles to realize the it. By the end of 2005, the end of the period covered by the book, OSAF still had not produced any usable code.

Determined more than ever to produce something, we retrenched and cut back on the ambition level drastically. I stepped back from an operational role, while remaining Chair, and Katie became the project’s General Manager. In September of 2007, we released Chandler Preview. I have been happily using it as my sole calendar for half a year now.

Since the release of Preview, there’s been a lot of soul searching around 543 Howard St. Members of the core team felt strongly about proceeding to a 1.0 release and beyond. Personally, I felt the time had come for me to move on and focus on other projects.

I’m proud of everyone who worked on the project, their persistence, and their contributions. Besides Chandler itself, OSAF was the birthplace of CalDAV, which is emerging as the standard for calendar coordination across multiple clients and servers. OSAF also served as the fiscal sponsor for the Mozilla Foundation between its spinout from AOL/Netscape and when it secured its own tax-exempt non-profit status. In that respect, it played a small but important role in the great Firefox success story.

The fact we did not produce what I had originally envisioned, should not detract from the value of what has actually been done so far nor should it detract from the possibilities for the future. I take responsibility for failing, early on, to match OSAF’s idealism with proportional pragmatism. It’s been a good and valuable lesson to learn and apply.

I spoke to one reporter who asked what my reaction was to bloggers “throwing dirt on the bones of the project”. I said, “that’s the job of the blogosphere, to be outrageously outspoken about everything. Bloggers are sometimes mistaken, but never in doubt.”

Freada and I have an op-ed in today’s San Francisco Chronicle titled Early admissions policies give children of the rich an edge. The premise is that a world in which some parents can afford to spend $40,000 to hire a coach to get their child into an elite college is not a world where all children have equal opportunities to make the most of their potential. The new idea we raise in the piece is a proposal about bringing greater transparency to the college admissions process.

A number of years ago, I helped support early work on a documentary film about the first modern computer programmers, the team of women who programmed the ENIAC computer during World War II. This is an untold story which deserves much wider exposure.

There’s going to be a documentary fundraiser on Thursday, November 8 at Google with Kathy Kleiman, the film’s executive producer, and Jean Bartik, an original ENIAC programmer.

Tickets are $100, and the location is:

Google Headquarters
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

Link to the event

Link to info about the ENIAC Programmer’s Project

We’re testing the new version of the Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer. If you’d like to help us shake out the last problems before we make it generally available, see the blog post here, where you can also download it.

Freada’s book has been officially published. I’m very happy for her.

The book ought to be required reading for everyone who wants workplaces to be the kind of respectful and inclusive environment one can feel good about. This has been a shared passion of Freada’s and mine for over 20 years, beginning as professional colleagues at Lotus in the 1980’s and blossoming into love & marriage in the 1990’s.

Read more here.

Order the book

Steven Levy in Newsweek:

And is there a more canonical boomer’s tale than that of Mitch Kapor (born 1950), who majored in psychology at Yale, was heavily involved in the campus radio station, and after graduation became … a teacher of Transcendental Meditation. But ever since he’d come across a copy of “Computer Lib” in a Harvard Square bookstore, he was fascinated by computers, particularly the promise they had to empower ordinary people. He began designing software, and then, around the time the IBM PC was launched, came out with an idea to make spreadsheets more powerful. His product was Lotus 1-2-3, and when he sought funding for his company, in a long letter to venture capitalist Ben Rosen he presented his idealistic vision of a humanitarian company. There are things as important to me as profit, he wrote. Now, he says, “It was my equivalent of ‘Don’t Be Evil’ ” [the unofficial Google motto].

The Chandler team has completed work on the Preview edition and I am delighted. I am happily using both Chandler Desktop and Chandler Hub (web) for production calendars. I will have more to say at another time about the long, six year journey, but for now it’s enough just to celebrate the moment. Below is an announcement form Katie Parlante, V.P. Engineering and General Manager of the Chandler project.

I am pleased to announce that the Chandler Project has hit our Preview milestone!

This milestone includes:
- Release of Chandler Desktop 0.7.0.1
- Release of Chandler Server 0.7.0
- Upgrade of Chandler Hub to Chandler Server 0.7.0
- Many improvements to the Chandler Project website and wiki

Chandler Project is an open source, standards-based personal information manager built around small group collaboration and a core set of information management workflows modeled on Inbox usage patterns and David Allen’s GTD methodology. You can manage and share calendars, tasks, messages, notes and other information with the Chandler Desktop application and/or with the Chandler Hub web application.

The Preview releases are public-beta quality applications ready for daily use. The Chandler team hopes to use feedback from these releases to build great 1.0 releases.

Download the desktop application, sign up for an account on the web, look at screenshots, watch screencasts, read about features, read about the project and more: http://chandlerproject.org/

Now is a good time to get involved with the project:
http://chandlerproject.org/getinvolved

Keep up with project general interest news and information on the project blog: http://blog.chandlerproject.org/

Cheers,
Katie

Back in the day, as my kids say, IBM was a behemoth, not only huge, but powerful.  IBM’s entry into   personal computers in the 1980’s defined and shaped the industry for a decade until Microsoft outsmarted them.  IBM remained a very big company, but their moves no longer commanded universal attention in the world of infotech startups.  Now, IBM has reinvented itself, relying very heavily on open source software to serve the enterprise market and has regained its health.

All this has opened up a spot for Microsoft to become the new IBM, large and powerful, but not terribly relevant to innovation outside the enterprise.  If I stand on the roof of my office on Howard St. in San Francisco and shout at the top of my lungs, there are probably 100 startups in the sound of my voice.  None of them, I dare to say, are worried about what Microsoft is going to do, but they are all properly obsessed with Google’s next move and how it is going to affect their prospects.

In short, if Microsoft is the new IBM, Google is the new Microsoft - the defining company of the industry.  Both Google and Microsoft are giant talent vacuum cleaners, hoovering up everyone with an IQ a few standard deviations above the norm.  Each has a Nietzschean will to power, a conviction of the rightness of its mission, and propensity to act in ways which are regarded as arrogant.
Since Google is no longer the hot new startup, those ambitious new startups are themselves trying to become the new Google.

It’s a giant game of musical chairs.