Making Digital Calendars Smarter

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.

In some of these areas, CalConnect is already working to provide standards-based mechanisms which can be used to implement these and other capabilities in an interoperable way. For example, meeting overload could be a logical extension to VAVAILABILITY, which allows you to control when you are available to be scheduled, and vary when you are available by who is trying to schedule with you. Travel time and locality are both related to work we are scoping on Travel Itineraries and will be discussing at our next meeting in June. We have started looking at regenerating tasks (“Why is this a surprise?”), and extending the capabilities of tasks is a variety of ways.

For those interested, a list of what we’re currently doing is at CalConnect Major Work Projects.

Jason has also identified some things we hadn’t thought of, and which we will look at adding to our future plans. Our thanks to him for an interesting and thought-provoking article.

About CalConnect’s New Membership Categories and Fees

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.

CalConnect has two sources of revenue – membership fees, and fees associated with CalConnect events. This revenue underwrites the technical work of CalConnect, as well as our Roundtable Technical Conferences (member meetings) and Interoperability Test events.

Here is how we see the revenue side:

1. CalConnect needs a sufficient revenue stream so that it can expand its reach, its programs, its services to promote interoperable and open calendaring, rather than having to focus our energy and efforts on cutting expenses when our revenues decrease.
2. We need to recognize the value we provide through CalConnect, with membership fees which reflect that value.
3. Our membership classifications and fees need to be coherent and “fair”.
4. CalConnect has not changed its membership fees since they were established in 2005. Using one of the accepted measures of inflation, $10,000 in 2005 is the equivalent of ~$11,800 in 2012.

Although increased revenue is a goal of CalConnect and most other organizations, non-profit as well as for-profit, there is more to this story than revenue.

Because European companies have been members of CalConnect since its inception, in 2007 we decided to bring CalConnect to Europe. As we later noted, “… as standards and interoperability are central to CalConnect’s mission, and are strong core values of European Information Technology, we have long recognized the importance of increasing European involvement in CalConnect”. We traveled in Europe again in 2008 to meet with members and potential members. In 2011, we held our first member meeting in Europe, CalConnect XXII, hosted by Kerio Technologies in Prague, Czech Republic.

Last October, CalConnect XXV was hosted in Z¨rich, Switzerland by Google. Just prior to returning home from Z¨rich, some of us got together over dinner to reflect on the meetings. We were all impressed by some of the non-members, smaller, newer vendors, by and large, who attended as first time observers and/or Interoperability Test Event participants. We all agreed that these “emergent” vendors brought an enthusiasm, and a different perspective which really informed and energized the meetings. Many of these vendors told us they shared our enthusiasm for their participation, but that the current membership fee structure made it difficult to consider CalConnect membership, a story we heard again at the next Roundtable, CalConnect XXVI, hosted by Oracle in Santa Clara, California.

Enfranchising emergent vendors was one of the topics we discussed at the Board’s strategic planning meeting, convened at the University of California, Berkeley, to develop the ideas we had brainstormed in Z¨rich. We continued these discussions within the Board, and early this year brought the issue to the CalConnect Steering Committee, composed of member representatives, which oversees the technical direction of the Consortium. The Steering Committee provided very useful guidance and feedback, especially concerning the fees for our Interoperability events, which was incorporated into the resolutions just approved by the CalConnect Board.

Here is what we hope to accomplish with our new membership and interoperability event fees:

1. Increase diversity, geographic distribution, age, gender, and company size of our membership. This is essential to CalConnect and its mission.
2. Enfranchise emergent vendors, to give them an appropriate voice while they develop their products and markets.
3. Make it easier for emergent vendors to join CalConnect, albeit limited to a single participant. We provide a three year, graduated migration path to full CalConnect membership, with unlimited participation.
4. Make it more attractive for non-member vendors to participate in interoperability test events. Even if these non-members choose not to become members, the test events are energized, and become more robust, through their participation.

All this amounts to increasing our engagement with the wider world of calendaring & scheduling, so we can better meet our goal of improving all aspects of calendaring and scheduling, in particular interoperability. Although we may very well choose to take a more comprehensive look at membership structure in the future, we are very pleased to be able to announce these exciting changes now.

On behalf of the CalConnect Board of Directors,

Gary Schwartz
President

On a recent petition to eliminate the time change caused by Daylight Savings Time

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

CalConnect has no stance either for or against the suggestion itself. However, we strongly advise that any decision to change the current DST rules be made long in advance to allow enough time for the necessary changes to software and computer systems which accommodate DST.

In 2005, Congress decided to change the start and end dates of Daylight Savings Time to provide three more weeks of DST in March, and one more week at the end of the year; so called “Extended Daylight Savings Time”. This was signed into law as the Energy Policy Act of 2005. CalConnect submitted an Advisory document shortly before the EDST legislation was signed, recommending as much time as possible because the scope of the change was so broad and affected so much. In that document we noted:

Anything that keeps a calendar, including cell phones, is potentially affected. Many embedded environmental systems such as building management systems, time-lock control, work-shift and time clocks, may also be affected. It is also not clear whether other countries that currently share the
same timezone and DST definitions as the US will adopt the new definitions at the same time, or stay with the current ones. This has serious impact for cross-border commerce as for two months in the year, regions of the US will have a local time one hour different than similar regions in other countries.

The law allowed 18 months before the new rules went into effect in March of 2007. During that time, CalConnect published a Review and Considerations document and followed it with a set of Links, Advisories and Changes, noting:

This document is a compilation of links to vendor-provided advisories, technical notes, change documents, and the like. Its primary purpose is to try and consolidate in one place links to references for Calendaring and Scheduling systems and major underlying operating systems, but links for related products and services will be provided when possible.

In the event, the actual change in 2007 caused considerable disruption, much of it in the Calendaring and Scheduling area due to necessary fixes and patches either not being distributed in time, or not being applied to the C&S systems.

A change to the DST rules today would have a far broader effect than five years ago, and of course far broader than calendaring and scheduling. The effect on areas as diverse as financial, travel, logistics and shipping, and in particular embedded systems, is likely to be extremely disruptive, and would spread even to the level of “intelligent” thermostats in the home. The impact can only be mitigated by serious and early attention on the part of the builders and vendors of any software, firmware and devices which accommodate DST, and a similar diligence on the part of the customers owning the software and devices.

Within CalConnect, after EDST went into effect we realized that much of the impact of the change was due to actual timezone definition data being resident in systems. In EDST Reflections and Recommendations, published in April of 2007, we offered some recommendations. Much of our subsequent focus in the area of timezones has been towards a Timezone Service protocol, which would allow systems and devices connected to the internet, calendaring and others, to obtain timezone information when needed rather than having it embedded in the systems themselves, and thus would not have to be modified to accommodate changes in DST definitions. Whether such a protocol can be in widespread use in time for any future DST change is questionable, but ultimately the adoption of such a mechansim will go a long way towards shielding users from the effects of DST transition changes.

CalConnect establishes CALSCALE Ad Hoc Committee to consider non-Gregorian calendar rules

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 Calendar Developers and System Administrators Public Discussion Lists

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.

CalConnect public discussion lists are moderated, and new subscription requests must be approved to be activated. Only subscribers may post to lists, or receive postings from the list. The list archives are publicly available.

Calendar and Scheduling Developer List

CalConnect has implemented this public discussion list (caldeveloper-l@lists.calconnect.org) for discussion of calendaring and scheduling developers’ issues and questions. The Charter and Rules of Use for this list are given on the list’s web page at the link above. We invite all calendar developers and other interested parties to subscribe to this list and make use of it.

The primary audience and expected participants are calendaring and scheduling system developers, and others working on calendaring-related and scheduling-related projects. However, the list is open to any and all participants that agree to and adhere to the rules of use.

Calendaring and Scheduling Sysadmin List

The Calendaring and Scheduling Admin Mailing List (caladmin-l@lists.calconnect.org) exists to foster discussion about all aspects of calendaring and scheduling system administration and management. This includes, but is not limited to, C&S platforms and applications, emerging C&S standards, message flows, access control, unsolicited or bulk agenda invitations (SPCAL), account management, virus vectors, disaster recovery, and interactions with closely related collaborative technologies.

The primary audience and expected participants are calendaring and scheduling system administrators. However, the list is open to any and all participants that agree to and adhere to the rules of use.

Veterans’ Administration Medical Appointment Scheduling Contest

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

“…encourage development of systems that help Veterans schedule appointments to receive care from the Veterans Health Administration and to reduce risks in the future procurement and deployment of those systems…The goal of this contest is to encourage creation of systems that help Veterans make appointments to receive outpatient and ambulatory care from the Veterans Health Administration. VA also seeks to obtain information which will allow it to reduce the risks inherent in procurement and deployment of a replacement medical scheduling product.”

In the course of learning more about this contest, we ran across these references which may be of interest to our membership and others interested in calendaring and scheduling:

http://vascheduling.challenge.gov/
http://vascheduling.challenge.gov/updates/663
http://www.osehra.org/wiki/mdws-scheduling-vha-innovations-sandbox
http://vascheduling.challenge.gov/updates/647
http://vascheduling.challenge.gov/forum_topics
http://vascheduling.challenge.gov/updates/649
http://osehra.org/group/mdws
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VistA
http://www.osehra.org/discussion/roger-baker-va-cio-refactoring
http://www.osehra.org/blog/cio-va-roger-baker-vista-open-source-initiative-memo

Although we have reached out to the VA to learn more about the role of calendaring systems in this challenge, CalConnect is not affiliated in any way with this contest or the VA.

VPOLL: Consensus Scheduling Component for iCalendar

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/.

This specification “introduces a new iCalendar component (VPOLL) which allows for consensus scheduling, that is voting on a number of alternative meeting or task alternatives”. This draft standard is intended to provide the broad interoperability needed to allow users to participate in consensus scheduling using the calendaring products and service they prefer rather than the product or service used first to enumerate the event and the scheduling choices.

Consensus Scheduling is the subject of a workshop at CalConnect XXVI next week: Consensus Scheduling Workshop at CalConnect XXVI. For more about Consensus Scheduling, see also 7 Things You Should Know About Consensus Scheduling.

Interoperable Calendaring means never, never, ever having to enter an appointment on more than one machine

In the context of CalConnect’s mission, to advance interoperable calendaring & scheduling in practical and useful ways, one of our major activities is to promote open-standards based calendaring and scheduling to the general public as well as the information technology industry. From time to time, we receive unsolicited help in bringing our message to the general public, such as David Pogue’s column in last week’s New York Times, “Bringing the Calendar Up to Date” (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/08/technology/personaltech/mixing-and-matching-to-create-the-near-perfect-digital-calendar-state-of-the-art.html?pagewanted=all).

The majority of Pogue’s article is concerning with calendar program user interfaces, and his suggestion that perhaps it is time for a paradigm shift in calendar UI’s. These issues are largely the province of the creative people and companies which produce end-user calendaring products, and the consumers who will ultimately decide which paradigms to accept, and which products to adopt and/or purchase.

However, at the very end, Pogue ventures into the heart of CalConnect’s territory, “Finally, it goes without saying (sic) that all modern calendars should sync. To other computers. To our phones. To the web. We should never, never, ever have to enter an appointment on more than one machine.”

There is more to interoperable calendaring and scheduling than just entering events only once, such as open standards which provide for a rich set of features which developers find practical to implement to produce the new UI’s Pogue advocates, facilitating scheduling across disparate calendaring systems and/or machine processes, preserving data integrity and semantics across systems, to give just a few examples.

However, Pogue’s almost parenthetical aside goes to the heart of a lot of it, and a lot of what CalConnect is doing today. Although CalConnect is not a formal standards development organization, virtually every important calendaring or calendaring-related standard over the last five years has been authored, edited and/or coedited by members of a CalConnect Technical Committee.

And our work in progress, in areas such as open, interoperable server to server scheduling (iSCHEDULE), standardized data representations in XML and (now) JSON, calendaring web services (in collaboration with OASIS in the context of the NIST “Smart Gird” initiative), timezone services, improved sharing of calendars and contacts, calendar alarms and attachments, extensions to provide richer expression of public events on the web, to name some of the areas our technical committees are working in.

Whereas many of these features exist today in some products, the implementations are proprietary, or work across only selected products. This is also true in another area we are working on, consensus scheduling, which is the process whereby a group comes to agreement on when (and maybe where) to hold a meeting or carry out a task, or identifies the “best” time – maximizing participation, minimizing inconvenience, to schedule an event or perform a task. Consensus scheduling minimizes the overhead of achieving consensus or identifying the most favorable time(s) by allowing the potential participants to observe the responses of the other voters, and to use any scheduling flexibility they may have to adjust their response for the benefit of the entire group.

There are many excellent products in this space, and some work with some other products in a limited context, but there is no open standard which allows you to choose a product and be confident it will work with all the calendaring/scheduling products you use today, and those which you may find yourself using tomorrow.

At our next member meeting, later this month, hosted by Oracle in Santa Clara, CA, we will be holding a “consensus scheduling” workshop. This workshop is open to non-members and there is no fee to attend or participate.

The “ProfHacker” blog in the “Chronicle of Higher Education” has a number of entries on consensus scheduling products and concepts. These posts by George Williams are a good place to start:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/scheduling-101-the-ideal-academic-app/22969
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/scheduling-101-a-few-updates-and-announcements/34823

CalConnect is truly a “partnership between vendors of calendaring and scheduling systems and tools, and users of those tools…” Although neither David Pogue, nor the New York Times, are members of CalConnect, a situation easily rectified, articles such as these not only help inform the general public, the “users of these tools”, but also inform the discussion and work of CalConnect and its members, and ultimately, new open standards (or changes to existing standards), and the resulting products which we will be using in the future.

Gary Schwartz
President, CalConnect, The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium

Calendaring and Scheduling Glossary of Terms Updated

Version 2.1 of the Calendaring and Scheduling Glossary of Terms has been published. Version 2.1 adds 20 new terms including Autodiscovery, Consensus Scheduling, Event Publication, Managed Attachment, Timezone Service, VAVAILABILITY and VPOLL.

CalConnect Consensus Scheduling Workshop – January 30, 2013, at CalConnect Roundtable XXVI

CalConnect, the Calendaring & Scheduling Consortium (http://www.calconnect.org), will hold an open Workshop on Consensus Scheduling in conjunction with its member meeting, Roundtable XXVI, on Wednesday afternoon, 30 January, 2013, at Oracle Corporation in Santa Clara.

This workshop will examine the state of the art with respect to consensus scheduling, and explore directions to integrate consensus scheduling into calendaring and scheduling standards and products, to enable interoperability and make consensus scheduling part of the full functionality of calendaring and scheduling products. There will be a presentation and discussion on CalConnect’s work in progress on VPOLL, a proposed new component for iCalendar in support of consensus scheduling.

Participation in the workshop is open to interested individuals and organizations, regardless of whether or not they work for CalConnect members, and whether they are otherwise registered for the CalConnect Roundtable or Interoperability Test Event. No fee will be charged for attending the workshop; however you will need to register in advance unless you have registered for the Roundtable, as space is limited.

Attendees are invited to attend the CalConnect Roundtable as observers, or to consider participating in the CalConnect Interoperability Test Event in the first half of the week.

Tentative Agenda:
1. Introduction – about CalConnect and about Consensus Scheduling
2. Participants lightning talks and discussion – vendors, experience as a user, user requirements or wishlists, etc.
3. Review of existing products
4. Review of CalConnect proposal
    a. Use cases (what is in scope, out of scope)
    b. Technical solution – VPOLL
    c. Interaction with CalDAV
5. Conclusion – what to do from here
    a. How to further promote the VPOLL work
    b. VPOLL testing at the next Interoperability Test Event

Venue:

The meeting will be held at the Oracle campus in Santa Clara, California as part of CalConnect Roundtable XXVI:  4040 Palm Drive, Santa Clara, California 95054. We will be in Building 23, Conference Room 1730.

Schedule:

The workshop will be held from 1:30 to 5:30 Wednesday afternoon, January 30th. Workshop attendees are invited to stay for the reception beginning at 6:00.

Registration and information:

To register for the workshop only, please see http://www.calconnect.org/workshopreg.shtml. To register for the CalConnect Roundtable and/or Interoperability Test Event, please see http://www.calconnect.org/regtypes.shtml.

Logistics information for the workshop and for the CalConnect event: http://www.calconnect.org/calconnect26.shtml.

More About Consensus Scheduling

Consensus scheduling is the process whereby a group comes to agreement on when (and maybe where) to hold a meeting or carry out a task, by identifying the “best” time or location to help maximize participation and minimize inconvenience.  Consensus scheduling minimizes the overhead of achieving consensus or identifying the most favorable time(s) by allowing the potential participants to observe the responses of the other voters, and to adjust their response for the benefit of the entire group. This has significant benefits over “traditional” group scheduling methods which typically involve the exchange of many messages between participants, each trying to come to agreement.  

Although there are a variety of consensus scheduling products and services available, it is not available in most full featured calendaring products, especially enterprise products. Consensus scheduling is not part of calendaring and scheduling standards, and each site and service provides different features and functionality, provides custom integrations with a subset of other calendaring and scheduling services and products, and has differing requirements for user access – authentication and authorization. As some people prefer one consensus service over the others, participants in many formal and/or informational groups may have to register and/or use many different services or sites in the course of their professional and personal activities.

CalConnect has for some time been working on developing a consensus scheduling solution that builds on the internet calendar standards of iCalendar and iTIP (the traditional solution to standards-based calendaring and scheduling).  CalConnect’s approach creates a new iCalendar component, VPOLL, and defines an iTIP process by which “polls” can be sent to participants and votes collected from them.  CalConnect’s work also looks at how this process can be integrated with calendaring system, such as those built on the standard CalDAV calendar server protocol, with the goal of providing more automation for voting and streamlining the decision process for voters.

Please see http://www.calconnect.org/7_things_consensus_scheduling.shtml for a further introduction to consensus scheduling and why it matters to calendaring and scheduling.

Previous CalConnect Workshops:

CalConnect has previously held workshops on vCard, Timezones, Contacts, and Tasks (VTODOs).