June 05, 2012

Collaborative GTG

GTG is an awesome task manager. For individuals. But if you work in a team, it sucks. You create tasks like Wait for mail from @Joey, Setup company blog @Mike and nag people to get things done. You don’t know if those tasks get from their mail or IM into their task manager. Every time you want to see the progress you annoy them and waste their time.

It will change this summer. Thanks to GNOME and Google, I am working on GSoC project Collaborative GTG.

How do you want to do?

I want to build the collaboration on XMPP. You have a jabber account in Empathy or similar client and probably have all of your colleagues there. GTG can leverage it and provide seamless integration.

XMPP has many useful extensions, specially XEP-0060: Publish-Subscribe (referred as PubSub). In a nutshell, GTG subscribes to a server and receives changes you made in other GTGs over XMPP in real time. Some folks build a social network based on this protocol.

What do you have so far?

Two weeks of GSoC coding period passed already week and I have my very first working prototype. Look at demo:

If you want to play, the code repository is on launchpad. I wrote down a tutorial how to setup XMPP server. Proceed with care, it is prone to break.