The World of Calendaring

Earlier this week, we welcomed Ribose as the newest CalConnect member, and our first member organization based in Asia. Including Ribose, five organizations have joined CalConnect since we announced our new membership fees and categories in April of this year.

Google announced earlier this week an update, clarification and expansion of their earlier “spring cleaning” announcement about CalDAV. . Piotr Stanczyk, the blogger, is Google’s primary representative to CalConnect, as he mentioned in his blog, and is here this week at CalConnect XXVII at the University of Wisconsin. 

The CalConnect TASKS technical committee has just published a new briefing document, 7 Things You Should Know About Tasks, intended for a general audience.

Earlier this week, Jason Snell posted an article on Macworld titled Why Aren’t Digital Calendars Smarter?. From CalConnect’s perspective it is particularly notable that, although many of Jason’s suggestions have been implemented in one product or another, they are not common features across many products, and certainly not standardized. Even when a function is implemented in more than one product, there is usually not much commonality in how it’s done and how it looks.

Earlier this week, we announced new membership categories and interoperability test event fees. We have been discussing and shaping these changes, the first since CalConnect was established in 2005, for the past 6 months. We want to share with our members and non-members alike what motivated these changes, and what we hope they will accomplish.

A petition has been initiated on the White House petition site to eliminate the twice-yearly time shift caused by Daylight Saving Time, either by eliminating it completely or imposing it all year.

CalConnect has established the CALSCALE Ad Hoc Committee to determine changes and extensions necessary to iCalendar to allow recurrences to accommodate non-Gregorian calendar rules, and will develop a draft specification to be submitted to the IETF for broader discussion within the entire IETF community. The Ad Hoc is intended to complete its work and report out at the CalConnect meeting in June 2013.

CalConnect offers two general public discussion lists for calendaring and scheduling, one primarily for calendaring system developers and one for system administrators of calendaring and scheduling systems. Each list has a home page on the CalConnect website with information about the purpose of the list, charter and rules of use, and a link to subscribe, maintain, and unsubscribe. Each list has well over 100 subscribers.

As some of our members already know, the United State Veterans Health Administration has announced a ‘VA Medical Appointment Scheduling Contest” (http://vascheduling.challenge.gov/) to

The VPOLL draft specification defining a new consensus scheduling component for iCalendar has been submitted to the IETF as an Internet Draft: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-york-vpoll/.