Time and tide - and general wear and tear - wait for no man. My server that used to serve this (and many other) sites (and mailing lists, and ...) finally turned up it's chips and croaked after about six years of use (secondhand when I got it, too). The last five-and-a-bit years of that was continuous uptime of 1819 days. A few days later I managed to arrange a visit to review the carcass, deep in the bowels of a blinking, humming shrine to technology and I replaced a dead fan, and a dead hard drive. I powered it on, and somewhat unbelievably to me, it yawned and blinked a few times and slowly lumbered back to life.
I then proceeded to suck all of the data off it as fast as it's little internet connection could go, and having done so I decided that another reboot was in order.
Which didn't.
Disasters like this rarely strike at a convenient time. In my case this particular disaster chose to strike the day that the XO Learning Tablet went live in Walmart, and of course we were all rather busy with smoothing out all those last-minute panics that happen around such a thing.
Really, it has been a hectic couple of years, from the depths of "it's cancer" (Heather is "a survivor" now), going back to contract at Catalyst after a four-year break (almost like going home: it's the same place, but there's someone else living in your room now and all your toys have gone into the attic), then getting asked to build the Android tablet UI for One Laptop Per Child.
I extracted myself from my committments to Debian, and even to DAViCal and aCal during this process. It's time, perhaps to look at returning to some of these things, but at this point I will have to be careful not to overcommit. I have started again to involve myself with calendaring standards through CalConnect, and I have done some small work on DAViCal (and arranged for a little extra beyond that). I will be working on aCal again over the coming months, time permitting.
In looking through all of these things, however, it is clear to me that someone else needs to take over some aspects of these projects. In particular I need other people to do the release coordination work so I can concentrate on just thinking about the implementations of features. Ideally other people would also help with things like running the websites and wikis, so I could ignore all that, too.
So if you've ever wanted to actively contribute to an open source project, get involved with DAViCal. Find out what people are doing. Decide when we should release a new version. Run the website. Or the wiki. Coordinate getting the changes implement, and the testing, and the translations, and then finally the release. Help!
Thank you.