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: 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.)
PrefaceToHierarchyPapers
Journal/HierarchyPapers
Journal/HierarchyVersusFacetsVersusTags

Mimi