GNOME Calendar

Bringing clarity and defining a new roadmap for the most elegant calendaring app for Linux

We provide product design guidance, project management & community management for this high-impact open-source productivity software product.

Challenge

Since 2005, we have been contributing QA and UX feedback to various open source calendaring applications on Linux, seeding the potential for them to develop into viable contenders to entrenched industry players (such as Google Calendar and Apple Calendar). Much like VCs’ investment portfolios, some of those projects have made modest progress while some others have improved by leaps and bounds.

In recent years, the project we have been most closely involved with is GNOME Calendar, a thoughtfully crafted application for the GNOME desktop and mobile platform. Indeed, GNOME Calendar has been punching above its weight and we believe it manifests the highest potential compared to its competitors. This can be explained by its lean design-first development model and the fact that it sustainably builds upon a modern set of robust and well-maintained technologies, including the Evolution Data Server (a battle-tested codebase that benefited from 25 years of testing and refinement, with a development cost estimated to $15M to $30M), the GTK toolkit providing a GPU-accelerated “adaptive” graphical user interface that can simultaneously work on mobile and desktop formfactors:

Infinite Month View

Night Time mode

Infinite Month View

Day Time mode

Detailed Week View

Day Time mode

Detailed Week View

Night Time mode

Optimal technological choices do not alone make a Free & Open Source software project thrive, however.

While GNOME Calendar was already showing great promise and making steady technological progress every year, it was struggling to establish a clear path forward and to attract new contributors into its developer community.

Solution

As we recognized the significant potential behind GNOME Calendar’s cutting-edge technological foundations and recent advancements, from 2022 onwards Regento invested additional efforts to raise it to a new level of product quality and community engagement.

Over the span of a few months, we held strategic discussions with key players in the community and put into motion a strategy to boost engagement around the project.

We started by carefully reviewing the project’s existing list of issues as well as its product design direction, to bring about a radical shift in priorities and scope clarity.

The strategic goal was to:

  • rebuild and expand the community of contributors;
  • publish new releases with a refined design, larger featureset, and much greater quality/reliability;
  • sustainably position GNOME Calendar as an attractive passion project for as many stakeholders as it takes to complete the roadmap defined by Regento.
GNOME Calendar's sidebar/mobile view

Outcomes

As a result:

  • The significantly reduced the number of tickets, combined with our detailed roadmap, allowed existing contributors to gain clarity on the strategic technical direction needed to steadily improve the product’s quality and solve the most important technical roadblocks (where solving one issue may potentially solve 20 to 50 other issues);
  • As part of our efforts and product design guidance, a completely new “Infinite Timeline” month view was developed. Read the main developer’s technical writeup and testimonial for more details.
  • New contributors have been progressively joining the project and tackling issues at the appropriate difficulty level for them to eventually become regular contributors;
  • Users and testers now receive timely and comprehensive support and guidance for troubleshooting issues, and can more easily find existing reports about the issues they may be facing;
  • All contributors, old and new, can benefit from reduced confusion and stress, with increased satisfaction and collaboration;

Ensuring the steady progress and sustainability of the GNOME Calendar project is part of Regento’s strategic goals, not only as it empowers us in our day-to-day productivity, but also because it builds and lays out the process for planning and budgeting Free & Open Source software product launches, to the benefit of those projects’ communities and the general public.

Future work

Regento has a vested interest in the long-term success of the GNOME Calendar project, and will continue to closely monitor and support this project to ensure its issues tracker remains focused and actionable, and we will seek to further reduce the number of open tickets as “critical path” issues are resolved.

As the product’s quality and featureset continues improving towards “feature completion”, we trust that we will be able to bring the number of tickets below 200, and eventually, as close as possible to zero.

We aim to facilitate obtaining initiative-specific funding from public R&D funds to accelerate GNOME Calendar’s development. This page will be updated accordingly in due time.