Introduction
Advancing calendaring technologies would benefit and convenience individuals and strengthen communities, directly, and would facilitate civic engagement and strengthen democracy, indirectly.
What if individuals could open their calendaring and scheduling applications to easily browse and discover future events?
What if individuals could open their calendaring and scheduling applications to easily browse and discover documents, minutes, pictures, and videos from past events using the same calendar-based user experiences?
What if individuals could automatically receive notifications when upcoming events of interest to them were modified, e.g., cancelled or rescheduled, and when past events of interest to them were modified, e.g., added to with documents, minutes, pictures, or videos?
Centralized and Decentralized Calendaring
To advance calendaring technologies, it appears that there are two options: centralized and decentralized architectures.
Centralized calendaring would involve people going to one or a few websites, e.g., www.yourcity.gov, to browse past and upcoming events via web-based calendar widgets. One or a few people in “calendar management” roles might receive emails from event organizers around town and then add received events to their communities’ calendars.
Similarly, one or a few services could make use of mailing lists to email their subscribers with .ics attachments, per the iCalendar format. There is also CalDAV to consider, a standard for people to access and manage calendaring data and to schedule meetings with people on the same or other remote servers. This standard allows multiple people in different locations to share, search, and synchronize their calendaring data.
Decentralized calendaring would utilize ActivityPub or derived technologies. Instead of every event provider or organizer having to coordinate with one or a few calendar managers, event organizers would simply publish their events and any updates to these themselves, e.g., events occurring at community centers, council meetings, libraries, nightclubs, parks, places of worship, restaurants, schools, social clubs, theatres, townhalls, or other venues.
See Also
On February 10, there was a meeting about Event Federation and the “Calendiverse”:
Conclusion
I would like to express support for the ongoing “Calendiverse” discussions and activities. I am eager to brainstorm and to discuss technology ideas to advance decentralized calendaring with you. Thank you.