CalConnect

CalConnect, the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium, is a partnership among vendors, developers, and customers to advance calendaring and scheduling standards and implementations. The mission is to provide mechanisms to allow calendaring and scheduling methodologies to interoperate, and to promote broad understanding of these methodologies so that calendaring and scheduling tools and applications can enter the mainstream of computing. The Consortium develops recommendations for improvement and extension of relevant standards, develops requirements and use cases for calendaring and scheduling specifications, conducts interoperability testing for calendaring and scheduling implementations, and promotes calendaring and scheduling.

Although not a standards body itself, CalConnect played a significant role in the development IETF RFC’s relevant to calendaring and scheduling, most notably the CalDAV specification, RFC 4791, "Calendaring Extensions to WebDAV (CalDAV)."

Organization

CalConnect’s governance structure consists of:

Board of Directors – Manages the Corporation’s affairs as a corporate entity; it is not involved in technical work. An Executive Director manages the Consortium’s day-to-day affairs and is responsible to the Board of Directors and the Steering Committee.
Steering Committee – Directs the Consortium’s technical direction and the management of its technical activities. The committee is composed of representatives from consortium members. The Chair of the Steering Committee also serves as a non-voting, ex officio member of the Board of Directors.
Technical Committees – Proposed by any Consortium member for the purpose of discussing and exploring different – or new – aspects of the Consortium’s scope of work, and to provide all participants an equal opportunity to become involved
TC-Chairs Committee – Consists of the Chairs of the various active technical committees and functions under the guidance of the Steering Committee as a status and coordination group for these various technical committees.

History

In 2003, Patricia Egen, SHARE’s liaison to the IETF and a participant in the IETF Calendaring and Scheduling Working Group (calsch), and David Thewlis, SHARE’s Chief Standards Officer began exploring ways to revitalize the calendaring standards work that had been somewhat languishing in calsch. Thewlis and Egen enlisted Pamela Taylor as a potential board member and incorporated CalConnect in January 2004 to promote interoperable Calendaring and Scheduling. Other interested parties, most notably from Oracle Corporation, IBM Corporation, the University of Washington, and Duke University, were among the founding members and helped recruited others to become members.

CalConnect saw its public launch in late 2004, with sixteen founding members from commercial and open source vendors, and leading research universities –- Duke University, EVDB (Now Eventful), Isamet, NASA Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), M.I.T., Mozilla Foundation, Novell, Oracle Corporation, Open Source Applications Foundation, MeetingMaker (now PeopleCube), Stanford University, Symbian, University of California Berkeley, University of Washington, University of Wisconsin, and Yahoo!.

Roundtable I, which was held September 2004 in Montreal, Canada, was the invitation-only meeting held during the formation of the Consortium and prior to its first member meeting. Roundtable II, held January 2005 in Seattle, Washington was the first member meeting of the Consortium.

The first Interoperability Test Event sponsored by and held under the auspices of CalConnect, testing of RFC 2445, RFC 2446 and RFC 2447, was held in Berkeley, California in July 2004, thus predating the actual formation of CalConnect itself. Prior to the founding of CalConnect, the calsch Working Group of the IETF held three IOP Test Events before going dormant.

Activities and work products

Member meetings

CalConnect member meetings, called "Roundtables," are held three times a year, generally hosted by CalConnect member organizations. Non-member organizations may attend a Roundtable once as "observers."

Interoperability test events

CalConnect Interoperability Test Events, or IOP Test Events, are typically held in conjunction with CalConnect Roundtables. IOP Test Events are open to both CalConnect members and non-members, and are overseen by CalConnect’s IOP Test Event manager. Two IOP Test Event reports are produced after each event, with a detailed report for CalConnect members only, and a "sanitized," public version omitting references to specific products.

CalConnect held its first European IOP Test Event, which was also its first The Mobile Calendaring Interoperability Test Event, in November 2008, in Plzeň, Czech Republic.

CalConnect also hosts a Virtual Interoperability Test Lab (also referred to as VCITE) to augment CalConnect’s IOP Test Events.

Technical committees

Through its technical committees, CalConnect develops recommendations for improvement and extension of relevant calendaring standards, develops requirements and use cases for calendaring and scheduling specifications, and designs the interoperability test events for various calendaring and scheduling tools. A brief description of each of these technical committees appears below:

TC-CALDAV—Defines Consortium use cases and requirements for CalDAV.
TC-EVENTPUB—Develops mechanisms to support event publishing.
TC-FREEBUSY—Originally charted to collaborate with The Open Group on their "Federated FREEBUSY Challenge." Promotes calendaring and scheduling interoperability with respect to the sharing and exchange of FREEBUSY information.
TC-IOPTEST—Supports CalConnect Interoperability Test Events, develop test suites, reference implementations, identify areas to test.
TC-iSCHEDULE—Develops proposal for Internet Scheduling Protocol (iSchedule).
TC-MOBILE—Develops recommendations for open standards-based Calendaring on mobile devices.
TC-TIMEZONE (Reactivated) -- Develops proposal for an official Timezone Registry and a Timezone Service.
TC-USECASE—Develops use cases and recommendations for calendaring, tasks and resources.
TC-XML—Develops a two-way reference mapping of iCalendar to XML.

Meet CalConnect

"Meet CalConnect" invitational events are held to introduce CalConnect to prospective members as well as those interested in interoperable calendaring. The first events were held in Prague, Czech Republic, and London, UK in November 2008.

Workshops

CalConnect has hosted two workshops in conjunction with its Roundtable events. These events have been open to the public as well as CalConnect members.

In September 2007, CalConnect hosted a one-day workshop on vCard.

In February 2009, a one-day workshop on Timezones was held.

Guest speaker program

This program allows CalConnect to invite individuals—those who have made significant contributions to or are experts in calendaring and scheduling or related domains of expertise—to attend a CalConnect Roundtable and address the attendees at the meeting.

The first CalConnect guest speaker was Ben Fortuna, the developer and maintainer of the iCal4j Java API, which provides support for the iCalendar specification as defined in RFC2445.

Recommendations, test suites, and surveys

CalConnect Technical Committees produce a number of work products which are made freely available on the CalConnect website, including:

Mobile Calendar Interoperability Test Suite (2008)
Mobile Recurrence Interoperability Recommendations (2008)
CalConnect EDST Reflections and Recommendations (2007)
The Benefits of iCalendar for the Mobile Industry (2006)
Timezone Registry and Service Recommendations (2006)
iCalendar Recurrence Problems and Recommendations (2006)
iCalendar Timezone Problems and Recommendations (2006)
Mobile Calendaring Questionnaire V2 Results (2006)

Public discussion lists

CalConnect hosts moderated, public discussion lists for specific purposes or events, as well as the more general "Calendaring and Scheduling Sysadmin List" to foster discussion about all aspects of calendaring and scheduling system administration and management.

Current management and membership

Since CalConnect’s inception, David Thewlis has served as Executive Director. As of September 2012, Board of Directors are President, Director, Gary Schwartz, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Chair of the Board of Directors, Chief Financial Officer, Director, Pamela J. Taylor, Sterling Commerce; Vice President, Director, Ciny Joy, Oracle; Secretary, Director, Dave Thewlis, DCTA Inc.; Steering Committee Chair, Director ex officio, Mimi Mugler, University of California; Director, Scott Mace, HealthLeaders Media.

CalConnect has experienced steady growth since December 2004. The 16 founding members have grown in numbers to 14 universities, 20 companies, and two open-source organizations. As of January 2009, organizational members include Apple, Cabo Communications, Carnegie Mellon, Dartmouth, Duke University, Eventful, Fresno State, fruux, Google, IBM, Kerio Technologies, MailSite, Microsoft, Mozilla Foundation, neutralSpace, New York University, Nokia, Oracle, Patricia Egen Consulting, PeopleCube, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Scalix, Sony Ericsson, Stanford University, Stockholm University, Sun Microsystems, SWAMI (Swedish Alliance for Middleware Infrastructure), Symbian, Synchronica, TimeBridge, University of California, University of Chicago, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, University of Washington, University of Wisconsin, Yahoo! and Zimbra.

External links

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