bowdenweb

I attended “Rethinking the Community Calendar” tonight, a talk by Jon Udell (@judell) about creating and cultivating a community calendar. One immediate, glaring takeaway is that iCalendar, AKA iCal is a web standard, and not a proprietary format owned by Apple. Apple Calendar did use to be called iCal, but this is no longer the case. It is also designed to be independent of the transport protocol, and iCal data can be embedded in HTML using the hCalendar Microformat. iCal is very much like RSS, however, and this is important, they are not the same; you should already have an RSS feed if you are publishing content on your site. If you are publishing events in a calendar, you should also have an iCal feed. While pointing out their differences is necessary, thinking of iCal like RSS was an easy way for me to paint the picture in my head. I blog a new post, my feed automagically pushes an alert to everyone who’s consuming my feed.

think pubsub, for iCal

Jon Udell,2013-04-23,”Rethinking the Community Calendar”

This “pubsub for iCal” is actually called elmcity and is open source for everyone who wants to get their hands dirty. (One of my initial thoughts was yes! Another tool to break away from silos!) As a web developer, I can fork this and have my own instance up and running today, but that’s not realistic for the masses. Which is essentially what the brunt of the talk was about, empowering citizens to control their data.

The Daily Press sponsored the event, and will be empowering Hampton Roads citizens to control their calendar data, as they have teamed up with Microsoft and Jon, to deploy elmcity. Hampton Roads’ elmcity will be among the first communities
in the country to adopt; this is exciting, ground-breaking stuff in the public forum, and will hopefully work in building momentum for adoption by the masses.

Two Reasons Why You Should Care About Publishing iCalendar Feeds

Personal Information Management

When you publish an iCalendar feed, people can subscribe to it from their personal calendar programs: Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple iCal, others. They can see public events (the soccer game, the musical performance) as overlays on their personal events (the dentist appointment, the birthday party).

Social information management

When you publish an iCalendar feed, it can syndicate to one or more services like the elmcity collector. A comprehensive view of what’s going on in a town or neighborhood can therefore emerge without any central management or control. Individuals, groups, and organizations can write down their event information once, and have it propagate through the syndication network without loss of fidelity or control.

Moving Forward: Hampton Roads

The best thing for Hampton Roads locals to do is to make sure that your calendar feeds are iCalendar; “Your” meaning feeds that you curate, as well as feeds that you use. If a feed that you curate is not, you can use
third party options like Google Calendar or Outlook. If the feeds that you use are not, contact the site admin and request that they provide an iCalendar feed. Once you have the URL to your iCalendar feed, or to a site’s feed that you use, simply submit it to the Daily Press. The rest is taken care of by the software. The more feeds the merrier!

Moving Forward for Web Developers

If you’re not using the calendar standard, start using the calendar standard. If you’re relying on a service for your calendar, ensure
that they are using the ical standard. I’m not aware of adoption statistics, but awareness of the standard is not that high (at least not to me), so I’m assuming adoption is not either. Notable non standard users are Constant Contact and Facebook. Jon is actually pulling in events from Facebook using the
developer API, which is cool, but that shouldn’t have to be necessary, plus who knows when they’ll pull the plug on it.

You can also get involved with development, elmcity repo, subscribe to curator hangout, read more on Jon’s blog, and/or simply spread the word. As developers, the onus is on us to lead the way.