What is the Dashboard?
It's this:
The dashboard is a piece of software which performs a continous, automatic search of your personal information space to show you things in your life that are related to whatever you happen to be doing with your computer at the time.
While you read email, browse the web, write a document, or talk to your friends on IM, dashboard does its best to proactively find objects that are relevant to your current activity, and to display them in a friendly way.
We call the dashboard an "association engine."
And connects with Evolution now, which is a client I've been looking at.