"Bongo is an easy-to-use mail and calendar system, offering a simple yet powerful user interface. The goal is to make sharing, organisation, and communication simpler, quicker, and more useful."

What is Bongo?

We're creating fun and simple e-mail & calendaring software. We want our inboxes to be usable again: e-mail should be a useful tool, not a productivity killer. We want to be able to use our calendars to organise our lives, and we want other people to be able to interact with us through it whether they use Bongo or not.

Although Bongo is a young project, the software itself has a long pedigree and we are simply amongst the latest custodians. But while the core code isn't new, the ideas we have and the direction we're taking are. We're not trying to create a "groupware" system to compete with well-known proprietary systems, or create an "enterprise platform" which encompasses everything from document management to project planning.

Best of all, Bongo is free (as in "freedom") software developed by an open community: we pride ourselves on being friendly and welcoming, and we see our project as being complementary to similar community projects.

Who will Bongo appeal to?

Our initial releases will be aimed at quite a narrow range of users. We are not targeting the "groupware" or "enterprise" markets: there are already many projects attempting to replace Exchange and Notes; we are not that project.

We see our main deployment targets initially as hobbyist home users, small office/home office situations and small/medium sized businesses (commonly referred to as SMEs).

We also hope that with our flexible architecture and open approach, many third parties will develop on top of Bongo for specific use cases, providing many extra features which don't come as standard. While we have no aspiration to be a "platform", we hope people will be able to achieve more by standing on our shoulders.

Why another mail/calendaring project?

The aim of the project is provide a friendly, usable system for users, but also to allow people to collaborate in ways that they're currently not able to. We intend for Bongo to be invisible social glue.

How is this different to other projects?

We're different in terms of both scope and technical design. We primarily intend a much more user-focussed experience: features will be governed less by corporate box-ticking, and more by results - it must make e-mail simpler or more useful.

Our technical design is very much influenced by traditional "UNIX" design principles. Although we provide an integrated system, it is very much modular. Individual protocols are implemented by "agents", and they are linked together by a common configuration and messaging system.

Bongo is written mainly in a mixture of C and Python, which makes it much more lightweight than many similar projects - you do not need a Java application server, for example.

What is this history of this project?

web: bongo-project.org