[Dev] Chandler Virtuality: Now and Future

[Mimi Yin]

Last Tuesday, I made a Design presentation to OSAF staff about the  
Chandler Virtuality: What it is today, the workflows it is designed  
to support and how it will mature into an extensible platform in the  
future.

The presentation slides can be found at: http:// 
wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/VirtualityPresentationSlides

Our working definition of virtuality is: The quality of unity and  
robustness of the shared imagined space.

Goals of the presentation:

1. Provide the vision and motivation for Chandler's design.

2. Establish a concrete, multi-dimensional user-centric conception of  
how information is stored and organized in Chandler both to provide  
context for development efforts in the 0.6 timeframe as well as to  
provide a focal point for development efforts moving forward in 0.7  
and beyond.

3. In addition, we wanted to...

Demonstrate how Chandler's virtuality will:
    - Feel familiar to users
    - Meet their organizational needs
    - Scale to deal with a lot of data
    - Make room for Chandler as an extensible platform

By:
    - Presenting research and user-based studies
    - Explaining the conceptual model behind the design
    - Demonstrating how the conceptual model is realized in the UI
    - Comparing and contrasting our design with alternatives

We intend to turn this presentation into a more coherent write-up and  
a series of screencasts. Hopefully, I will post something to the blog  
over the next few weeks.

In the meantime, some related reading if you're interested can be  
found at:
http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html (A long, but  
interesting blog posting comparing fixed hierarchical  taxonomies and  
more free-form "items in a soup" organizational systems.)

http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/PrefaceToHierarchyPapers
http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/HierarchyPapers
http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/ 
HierarchyVersusFacetsVersusTags

Mimi