Clarification on meeting times - UTC/timezone issues

Can we clarify this?

I thought the meetings were defined at a UTC time - SocialCG - W3C Wiki says

Meetings in general are alternating Fridays and Saturdays. On Friday at 1700 UTC and Saturday at 1500 UTC.

However today’s meeting happened at a different time: 2021-05-01 Fediverse Interest Group Meeting

  • 2pm UTC

I think I know what happened, based on another comment on that post:

Per the calendar

So this meeting was set based on the NextCloud calendar.

The problem is, that calendar - the NextCloud one - has a timezone “bug”. It’s set to reoccur an event in London time NOT UTC time - ie, it stays 3 oclock (London Time) whenever the event is in the year. However, the event is defined at UTC time so if you then look at London time you should see the event time (London time) shift by an hour over the year.

I did point this out when the calendar was created: SocialCG meetings calendar - #2 by jarofgreen

The ActivtyPub aware event listing I put together carefully always created events at UTC time - so if you look down the page (it should open showing them in London time) you’ll see they jump by an hour at one point: https://denof.theoccasionoctopus.net/a/w3_social_web_incubator_community_group/manage/event?eventListFilterDataSubmitted=1&showCancelled=1&set_timezone=Europe/London

So this is a long winded way of saying it’s not my fault I was late for the meeting :slight_smile:

But seriously; can we clarify meeting start times for future?

SocialCG - W3C Wiki says 1500 UTC

2021-05-01 Fediverse Interest Group Meeting says 2pm UTC.

Something is wrong

I’ve set the calendar to use UTC - So 3pm UTC Saturdays and 5pm UTC, Fridays, as it says on the wiki.

This means they’re an hour later than previously during the summer in regions with daylight savings.

If the ‘new’ times (for some people) are now bad, we can have a separate thread about moving the meeting time, I guess.

Thanks for being timezone/calendar monitor, James :slight_smile:

2 Likes

James, sorry!
Find the logs of the meeting under the announcement soon …
I would be fine with any time :slight_smile:

Thanks for diagnosing this @jarofgreen

1 Like

A good site to use when in doubt is time.is and it will tell when timezones are not in use atm.

We may also add timezone options for the SocialHub dwellers cities. Please chime in with the timezone you’re in so we can adapt the list that shows in the date tool.

Anyone can also open Welcome! - Den of The Occasion Octopus and scroll to the footer for a link to change to any timezone they want.

Can we add that to the instructions :stuck_out_tongue: