My fiancée Kate designed a goal management concept long before I met her, and back in 2007 it became a personal project of ours to turn this concept into a real tool, Goal Organiser. I was a programmer with a lot of free time at my disposal and Kate had been sitting on her idea for years. Back then when we first fell in love, we really were like two jigsaw pieces and this project became sort of a symbol of this. She gained the tool she’d been waiting so long to develop, and QWeb gained another project to showcase.
Unfortunately, 5 years later I no longer have enough free time to maintain or further develop a non-profit project and with just under 1500 members, current statistics suggest that there’s a mere handful of people who still use Goal Organiser. Kate herself has moved on to better algorithms and I don’t have the time to turn these algorithms into a new website.
Perhaps some day we’ll put our heads together again and a new tool will emerge, but for now it’s time to call it a day. As a business, it doesn’t make financial sense to keep this project running and these days there are better tools out there to use. Check out the fantastic GTD software comparison list at Priacta.com.
Goal Organiser will shut down this coming June. If you’re interested in taking the project over, please get in touch. The code is old and doesn’t really follow any modern day standards or methodologies but the algorithms themselves are still good and I’m happy to help with server migration. For privacy reasons, user details will not be provided so existing accounts will not be migrated.
In all honesty, I’m a little sad that we’re letting go of this tool. It was our first project together and I’m sure it’s development caused a few of our first arguments too.
It’s time to move on.
Richard,
I’m more of a .NET guy otherwise I would have asked to adopt this baby!
Regarding user data, perhaps you can offer users the ability to export their data and point them to the new home of the project once someone takes the project over; the users would then be able to import their data back into the system and continue using it.
All the best,
Nas Raja
Hi Nas,
Thanks for the suggestion. We’re actually now in the process of transferring ownership of this project to it’s new maintainer and I’m very confident this is the right person to drive Goal Organiser forwards.
Regarding user accounts, I think this is a great idea and we’ll certainly look into developing this functionality if the new owner decides to keep the existing website going for a while. It’s my understanding that the project will be rebuilt to some extent, so whether this is a feasible long-term I’m not entirely sure. Exporting data from one system and importing into a different system can be a tricky business.
Whatever happens, I hope you continue to use and enjoy Goal Organiser. I for one can’t wait to see where this ends up.
Regards.