Reports on CalConnect XXVI

Reports on the recent CalConnect XXVI Roundtable and Interoperability Test Event, hosted by Oracle in Santa Clara, California, January 28-February 1, 2013, have been published on the CalConnect website.

CalConnect XXVII will be June 3-7, 2013, hosted by the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin.

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.

CalConnect Returns to Europe and to Prague

CalConnect will hold its Autumn, 2013 Interoperability Test Event and Technical Conference (Roundtable) on September 23-27, 2013 in Prague, Czech Republic, hosted by DHL Express at its ITS Data Center. Our Autumn 2011 event was hosted by Kerio Technologies in Prague, and we will very much enjoy returning to one of Europe’s most charming cities.

CalConnect Establishes TC TASKS Technical Committee

CalConnect has established a new Technical Committee, TC TASKS, following the report-out of the VTODO Ad Hoc Committee. The TC’s Charter is to “Extend the functionality of the iCalendar and specifically VTODO object model to provide enhanced support for tasks including needs such as project management, smart power grids and business task scheduling, in a way that allows a calendaring system to manage the data and calendaring clients to display and change it.”

The new Technical Commitee has a very aggressive schedule and deliverables (see the charter and schedule at TC TASKS Charter).

Member representatives of CalConnect members are welcome to participate in the new Technical Committee. Non-members interested in this activity are encouraged to join CalConnect and participate in the work of TC TASKS.

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.