iCal Syndication
I've been reading up on iCal lately, and to my surprise, it's really developing. This may be old news to many of you, but I was really surprised to read that iCal is being used as a method for syndication of "shared" calendar data. Immediately my mind started to work on ways to use this on the EDUCAUSE site.
Of course, when I have a question or a thought about a new technology, I immediately call Matt over to talk. I think the first foray we can take into this arena would be a subscription service to the EDUCAUSE Professional Development events. Next step could be syndicating the Events Calendar. And then it hit me - this could be a perfect mechanism to drive the Events Calendar service!
Here's what I'm thinking (and bear with me, it's "pre-embryonic" at this point). If enough people are syndicating calendars with iCal, I could write an iCal Aggregator that would gather events from all over that may be of interest to the membership, and the higher ed community at large. Instead of relying on staff and the membership to tell us about events via the Events Calendar, we could gather these listings from existing sources, and tell you what's happening! It's a very exciting thought for me.
What do you think? Who do you know that's using this technology? I'm super interested to hear any thoughts or comments on this.
You might be interested in SchoolBell (http://schooltool.org/schoolbell), which is an iCal calendar server. We just packaged a "release candidate" for SchoolBell 1.0, so your timing is good. I'll be working up more documentation in the next two weeks, as we get ready for the final release. In the meantime, if you're interested, contact me (tom.hoffman@gmail.com) and I can set up a test instance for you. SchoolBell lets you "overlay" multiple calendars in one web page, like one does on a desktop client.
Don't want to get too geeked up about iCal in the long run. It is a very complex standard that is inconsistently implemented. On the other hand it is all we've got at the moment. Serious momentum is forming behind CalDAV, especially in academia, so your long term plans should focus on that if possible. Also, depending on what you mean by "syndication," RSS might be a better choice. There's some prior art on the subject.
I can also see how this might be valuable/interesting to our members. To be able to see all higher ed related events from one site ... whether it is our site or the site of someone else syndicating our feed, now that could be interesting. I know that some positions cross a lot of boundaries -- both professional and geographical ;) -- JT, you might be on to somehting here.
I don't know about other domestic higher ed related associations, but I do know that these two groups are actively using iCal.
http://www.edna.edu.au/
http://www.cetis.ac.uk/
Whether it is iCal or some other emerging standard, I'm very intrigued. I don't think RSS would be a good fit unless someone comes up with a namespace that we could use to support the extra "fielded data" ... but maybe someone has already come up with that? If so, RSS would probably be ideal. The only problem then is that iCal has become somewhat predominant in the client calendar world. And then there is CalDAV, which Tom mentions above. Still, fun stuff to think about ... could easily begin to start with one solution and then build on support so that we could interoperate with other standareds.
Okay enough rambling about that. Thanks for the post JT!