A few weeks ago, other members of the Zeitgeist team and myself visited OpenSUSE Conf in Nuremberg. I met a lot of interesting people there and took part in a lot of conversations and discussions regarding the near future of Gnome, Zeitgeist, Mayanna and other projects.

One of the most fruitful encounters was the one with Sebastian Faubel and Moritz Eberl from the Organise Framework. They are writing an abstraction layer on top of the hierarchical file system with the use of semantic web technology. To that end, they are working on a replacement for the Gnome file open/save dialog. At the time of OpenSUSE Conf, they were looking for a plugin system to allow different views on your files. After presenting Mayanna to them and talking for a while, they decided, that Mayanna was exactly what they were looking for.

They are currently working on a prototype of their file open/save dialog which will contain a leaner version of Mayanna. If fate treats us well and the community likes their approach, the whole thing will be ported to C to be included into Gnome.

That means the heart of Mayanna will be ported to C as well, which should provide us with an even faster and more memory efficient core. Hurray!

I was a Google Summer of Code mentor for Gnome and Zeitgeist and although the student’s application that I should have mentored didn’t make it through the selection process. A few days ago, my very own Summer of Code T-shirt arrived! If someone has a size S and wants to change for size M, let me know

So what is Mayanna? Technically speaking Mayanna is a plugin architecture to handle objects of interest. But let’s look beyond that for a little while.

Mayanna was created with the goal to concentrate the access to all of a users data in one place. With all the data sources out there that is a task much too big for life, but we don’t stop there. Because just piling up data is no use to anyone (except big companies), Mayanna has a set of secondary goals. Here is just a short list of examples:

• flexible sorting and ordering methods
• a customizable user interface
• detecting connections between pieces of data

So how do we do it?
We created a plugin system that is designed to make the creation, manipulation and presentation of “objects of interest” (a picture, a contact, an email, a chat log,..) as easy as possible. And we are now creating plugins and adding features. Of course we can’t do all the work ourselves.

So if you like the idea and want to help, visit us at mayanna.org or in our IRC channel #mayanna on freenode.