"Thwump" sounds happen in boxing matches, not offices. So when a loud thwump bounces off the exposed-wood ceiling in an office in San Francisco's once trendy south-of-Market district, every head turns. Programmer Jed Burgess is flat on his back next to a blue fitness ball. Burgess gets up, pulls his socks off for traction, and manages to balance atop the ball. Applause breaks out. Then the office returns to quiet discussions of software architecture punctuated by the clicking of keyboards. Welcome to Mitch Kapor's Open Source Applications Foundation.

Kapor himself, famous as the founder of Lotus Development and one of the software industry's chief malcontents, is away from the commotion. But if his foundation succeeds, it'll make a thwump the entire software business will hear. The organization's 13 programmers are hard at work on a piece of software that could change the way we manage our digital lives, curing the headaches of having to juggle the dozens of types of information stored on personal computers by a variety of applications-and, Kapor hopes, making computer users happier and more productive in the process.

Code-named Chandler, after the mystery writer (because, Kapor says, what they're creating was something of a mystery even to them when the venture launched two years ago), the software promises to put all related e-mail messages, spreadsheets, appointment records, addresses, blog entries, word-processing documents, digital photos, and what-have-you in one place at one time: no more opening program after program looking for the items related to a specific topic. It takes the core functions of Microsoft Outlook, the Palm Desktop, and other personal information management programs and integrates them with the rest of your PC and the Internet. All the information you need to complete a given task or project is grouped on-screen, organized around the one function-e-mail-Kapor sees as the central conduit of our electronic lives.

A New Agenda

Kapor hopes Chandler will draw droves of converts but says he knows how fickle the software business can be. The seminal Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet was the must-have application that did more than any other to launch the personal-computer revolution. But Kapor, who founded Lotus in 1982, left the company five years later to lead On Technology, which had less success. He quit the software world altogether in 1990, when he cofounded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-civil-liberties group that filed, and won, some of the earliest cases involving privacy protection and free speech online. After that, Kapor became a philanthropist and investor, hitting it big with founding investments in Real Networks, the Seattle-based streaming-media giant, and UUNET (now part of MCI), which runs the largest privately owned chunk of the Internet's backbone network.

Now he's back to his first love, software design. He thinks most of the "productivity" programs available to workers and consumers today are too complicated and inflexible. Case in point: Kapor and his wife Freada Kapor Klein, who leads a small sexual-harassment consulting firm, wanted to use the calendar-sharing feature of Outlook to coordinate their schedules and those of their assistants. But to do so they had to install and administer Microsoft Exchange, a heavy-duty server program for corporate messaging and collaboration Kapor calls expensive and hard to maintain. "It's total overkill and it's horrible," he says.

That experience was on Kapor's mind as he considered reviving the ideas behind Agenda, a database and information organizer that was his Lotus swan song. Agenda automatically stored free-form database entries-such as "Call Alice on Friday about the Australia trip"-under multiple categories, such as phone calls, Alice, Australia, and Friday. It then recalled the entries at the appropriate times-for example, when the user reviewed Friday's to-do list. Even though Agenda ran on Microsoft's original DOS operating system, requiring users to learn many typed commands, devotees raved about the program's ability to sort related data from disparate sources. But the program never sold well, and Lotus abandoned it after Kapor left.