Thunderbird:Summit 2014

Toronto Thunderbird Summit October 15-18, 2014

The Thunderbird Community is planning to get together at the Mozilla Office in Toronto, Canada for 4 days, Wednesday October 15, 2014 - Saturday October 18, 2014.

Current Status

2014-09-18 status update: Mike Conley is working with a travel agent to sort travel arrangements for people whose attendance will be paid by Mozilla.

2014-09-05 status update: The Summit is happening!

Location

Meetings: Mozilla Toronto office

366 Adelaide St W, Suite 500 Toronto, ON M5V 1R9 Canada

map to Mozilla office

Hotel: Hilton Garden Inn Toronto Downtown

92 Peter Street, Toronto, Ontario, M5V 2G5, Canada

maps and direction to hotel

Map of airport transit

Overall Goals and Purpose

In 2012, Mozilla made a major change to the funding and structure of Thunderbird. Funding was dramatically reduced, but Mozilla agreed to provide basic funding and staff to ensure the continuing stability of Thunderbird, leaving innovation up to a community of volunteers. The departing Thunderbird staff and existing volunteers had a meeting in Warsaw in Fall 2012 to discuss the transfer of responsibility.

We've now had a couple of years to see how this is working out. Thunderbird usage continues to grow (in spite of media reports in 2012 that "Thunderbird is dead"), and we've recently released a new version of Thunderbird.

Yet there are many issues confronting the Thunderbird product that need resolving if we are to effectively serve our user base. Thunderbird has a community that would love to move the product forward, and we need to resolve some of these issues to remain useful and relevant. A short, incomplete list of issues:

• The Thunderbird staff team that was originally promised to provide stability to Thunderbird has been largely preoccupied with other Mozilla initiatives, and is not able to maintain the product.
• Existing volunteers spend most of their time keeping Thunderbird functional at all in the light of massive changes occurring in the base code, leaving little time for innovation or improvements.
• Innovation efforts that were in-process in 2012, and were badly needed, have largely remained frozen and incomplete. This includes maildir, replacement address book, async database processing, and others.
• Many volunteer contributors express frustration at the lack of direction and leadership of Thunderbird.
• The governance structure of Thunderbird is a remnant of the old staff-driven project, rather than reflecting a community-driven project.

On June 13, 2014, rkent sent out an email to approximately 20 key contributors asking if we should consider some sort of meetup to discuss issues, and see what it would take to move Thunderbird forward. The vast majority responded that this was needed, and we arrived at October 15-19, 2014 as viable dates for most people. We investigated locations, and chose the Mozilla office in Toronto as the best location, as it is fairly centrally located, visas are easy, Mozilla has space there we could use at no direct cost, and several contributors live in the Toronto area.

Invited Attendees

1. R Kent James, Mailnews Peer (Washington, USA)
2. Magnus Melin, Thunderbird Peer (Finland)
3. Richard Marti, Thunderbird Theme Module Owner (Switzerland)
4. Florian Quèze, Thunderbird Instant Messaging module owner (France)
5. Mike Conley, Thunderbird Peer (Toronto, Canada)
6. Irving Reid, Mailnews de-facto Peer (and assigned Mozilla Thunderbird staff), (Toronto, Canada)
7. Philipp Kewisch, Calendar Module Owner (Germany)
8. Patrick Cloke, Thunderbird Instant Messaging peer (Massachusetts, USA)
9. Wayne Mery, Thunderbird drivers and QA volunteer (Pennsylvania, USA)
10. Aceman, Thunderbird key developer, (Slovakia)
11. Thomas Düllmann, Thunderbird bug triager, (Germany)
12. Hiroyuki Ikezoe, Mozilla Japan Thunderbird developer (Japan)
13. Suyash Agarwal, Thunderbird key developer and GSOC intern (India) visa declined
14. Blake Winton, Thunderbird Peer and UI lead (Toronto, Canada)
15. Joshua Cranmer, Mailnews multi-module owner and peer (New York, USA)
16. Josiah Bruner, Thunderbird Theme Peer (Michigan, USA)
17. Mark Banner, Thunderbird and Mailnews Module Owner (England) is not coming
18. Jim Porter, Thunderbird MIME Peer (Boston, USA) is not coming
19. Roland Tanglao, Thunderbird support (Vancouver, Canada)
20. Andreas Wagner, Add-on reviewer and developer, DFKI GmbH, ForgetIT Project (Germany)
21. Daniel Scruton, Instantbird contributor (Italy)
22. Nihanth Subramanya, Instantbird contributor (Goa, India)
23. Merike Sell, Lightning contributor (Estonia)
24. MakeMyDay, Lightning contributor (Germany)

Possible non-funded participants

1. Bron Gondwana, IMAP protocol expert (FastMail, Australia)
2. Evert Pot, Interested bystander from Fruux (Toronto)
3. JoeS1

Schedules

Full Name	Email Address	Check-In Date	Check-Out Date	Arrival Time	Arrival Airport	Departure Time	Departure Airport
"Agarwal, Suyash"	syshagarwal@gmail.com	14-Oct-2014	18-Oct-2014	14-Oct-2014 12:35PM	YYZ	19-Oct-2014 8:45PM	LHR
"Bruner, Josiah"	josiah@programmer.net	15-Oct-2014	18-Oct-2014
"Cloke, Patrick"	clokep@gmail.com	14-Oct-2014	18-Oct-2014	14-Oct-2014 8:20PM	YYZ	18-Oct-2014 8:30PM	YYZ
"Conley, Mike"	mconley@mozilla.com
"Cranmer, Joshua"	Pidgeot18@gmail.com	15-Oct-2014	18-Oct-2014	15-Oct-2014 7:30PM	YTZ	18-Oct-2014 9:35AM	YTZ
"Düllmann, Thomas"	thomasd.bugzilla@gmail.com	14-Oct-2014	19-Oct-2014	14-Oct-2014 2:55PM	YYZ	19-Oct-2014 8:30PM	YYZ
"Guth, Stefan"	makemyday@gmx-topmail.de	14-Oct-2014	19-Oct-2014	14-Oct-2014 3:50PM	YYZ	19-Oct-2014 9:20PM	YYZ
"Ikezoe, Hiroyuki"	hiikezoe@mozilla-japan.org	14-Oct-2014	18-Oct-2014	14-Oct-2014 4:40PM	YYZ	18-Oct-2014 2:05PM	YYZ
"James, Kent"	kent@caspia.com	13-Oct-2014	20-Oct-2014	13-Oct-2014 5:45PM	YYZ	20-Oct-2014 6:10AM	YYZ
"Kewisch, Philipp"	kewisch@gmail.com	14-Oct-2014	18-Oct-2014	14-Oct-2014 5:12PM	YYZ	18-Oct-2014 7:30PM	YYZ
"Marti, Richard"	richard.marti@gmail.com	14-Oct-2014	19-Oct-2014	14-Oct-2014 7:55PM	YYZ	19-Oct-2014 5:35PM	YYZ
"Melin, Magnus"	magnus.melin@iki.fi	15-Oct-2014	18-Oct-2014	15-Oct-2014 3:50PM	YYZ	18-Oct-2014 6:15PM	ORD
"Mery, Wayne"	vseerror@lehigh.edu	15-Oct-2014	18-Oct-2014	15-Oct-2014 5:16PM	YYZ	18-Oct-2014 11:39AM	YYZ
"Ondráška, Peter"	acelists@atlas.sk	14-Oct-2014	19-Oct-2014	14-Oct-2014 7:05PM	YYZ	19-Oct-2014 9:20PM	YYZ
"Quèze, Florian"	fqueze@mozilla.com	14-Oct-2014	19-Oct-2014	14-Oct-2014 1:00PM	YYZ	19-Oct-2014 8:55PM	YUL
"Reid, Irving"	irving@mozilla.com
"Sell, Merike"	merikes@gmail.com	14-Oct-2014	19-Oct-2014	14-Oct-2014 2:45PM	YYZ	19-Oct-2014 6:25PM	YYZ
"Subramanya, Nihanth"	nhnt11@gmail.com	14-Oct-2014	19-Oct-2014	13-Oct-2014 7:55PM	BOM	20-Oct-2014 5:25AM	BOM
"Tanglao, Roland"	rtanglao@mozilla.com			14-Oct-2014 7:26PM	YYZ	19-Oct-2014 8:15PM	YYZ
"Wagner, Andreas"	mail@andreaswagner.org	14-Oct-2014	20-Oct-2014	14-Oct-2014 4:15PM	YYZ	20-Oct-2014 5:50PM	YYZ
"Winton, Blake"	bwinton@mozilla.com

Agenda

Wednesday and Thursday, October 15 & 16, will be work days where team members will work jointly on coding issues (a "hackathon"). Proposed areas for progress include:

• Design for a new address book (code-named Ensemble)
• Fixing crasher bugs
• Design of the user interface for a filter editor supporting boolean search criteria

Friday will be devoted to all-hands discussions where we will try to resolve a number of critical issues affecting the project. Some example items for the agenda:

• How can we work collaboratively to make plans for product direction (a roadmap) with our limited resources? Should we even have a roadmap?
• How should we organize the project governance to make a transition between the old Mozilla-dominated leadership, to a community-based governance module?
• How can we fill non-coding gaps in project operations, including marketing, business development, and contributor engagement?
• How can we better empower bug triagers to have an impact to actually get bugs fixed?
• Should we be raising income through donations? If so, what form would that take, and how would the income be used?
• What are the obstacles and frustrations that people are experiencing in contributing to Thunderbird, and how can we overcome these?
• Who are our users? How can we better understand and meet the needs?
• What are some reasonable promises that we could make with our funding campaign? Ideas:
  • Fully Support maildir
  • Fully Support > 4GB folders
  • CardDAV in address book
  • Filter on Send

Saturday will be divided into subgroups to develop plans and address issues, according to interest areas.

Funding Appeal Video

During the summit, we intend to film a video that will be used as part of our proposed direct appeal to users for Thunderbird funding. Brainstorming for that video is here: Thunderbird Funding Appeal 2014

FAQ

1. What is the schedule? The current expectation is that Oct 15 & 16 will be work days for people to collaborate on Thunderbird-related projects. Friday Oct 17 is the "all hands" day where we will try to have any critical discussions about the project, as the most regular contributors are available on that day. The conference continues through Saturday afternoon, October 18. You may attend all or part of the conference, but if you are not a regular contributor, it might be best to attend just Friday and Saturday.
2. Who may attend? The conference is open to all. Regular project contributors are strongly encouraged to attend.
3. What will it cost? The conference itself will be without charge. We are currently trying to gather funds so that we will be able to pay the travel and expenses of 10 - 20 regular contributors, though others are free to come if you can fund your own travel and expenses.
4. How can I get more information? Email R Kent James <kent@caspia.com> or contact rkent in Mozilla #maildev IRC
5. May I make a suggestion? Sure. Use Thunderbird Summit 2014 Suggestions for agenda or other suggestions

Other

Thunderbird Summit 2014 Budget and Funding Issues