User talk:Mchua/calendar

How is this kept up to date? --Lauren 14:19, 10 August 2007 (EDT)

I shudder to say it, but... manually? Basically, we need a way to keep track of

• "external" content deadlines - if I'm an external developer working on some piece of content, I need some place to go to find out about the relevant deadlines on where I can submit what material to for inclusion in where. Use case: I run an online children's library that has lots of great open content books that I'd love to share with the OLPC project... Where do I go to find out where I should send my .xol files to, by when, for each of the upcoming content deadlines?

  we have regular and periodic deadlines, and contributors should be publishing regularly and often. bundles are sent to a small set of source control repositories and activity/library pages (and occasionally mailing lists), regardless of calendar. a small calendar that tracks deadlines is useful, but it can be much simpler -- a bullet list on a larger page of calendar lenses, or a calendar for everything with single-phrase milestones that link to more details, colored by class of calendar item.

• "external" content events - what content related meetings are there (IRC chats, conference calls, gatherings in country or in 1cc or elsewhere) that are okay for anyone interested to stop by for, and where/when? Currently, the only people actually coming to any kind of content meetings whatsoever are (1) OLPC staff/interns or (2) good friends of OLPC staff/interns who are individually invited/told about the meetings by their friends. Which is okay for a core team, but really annoying if we'd like to open up meetings to other interested people. Use case: I'm a software developer in Cambridge that wants to help out with OLPC content in my spare time, and would like to follow what's going on in meetings & discussions & such so I can write little Python scripts on the side that might be helpful in automating some library actions. What are the chats and meetings that are going on that I might attend?

  "Opening meetings to other interested people" also means allowing them to share ownership of defining, scheduling, and hosting meetings for their own projects. We should focus on doing that and properly sharing organization and broadcasting of this type of event / milestone, many of which take place without informing English-speakers in Cambridge. I'm also not sure physical meetings are the most relevant events... projects on irc and on the wiki are just as interesting to track and more frequent. to be properly distributed, we should focus on making the irc portion of meetings good, since nothing else scales. Apache is famous for its commitment to having no unscalable meetings; this may be worth emulating. Sj talk

• "internal" content events - probably best served via the google calendar we already have up, but this is stuff like "have meeting with X group, have teleconference with Y group" - conversations that are not public to the external world.

  this is something we should open up somewhat to the broader team of contributors and volunteers around the world -- a shared calendar of events in proper cal format. Can someone add another google calendar layer and make it public? That has come up twice this week. Sj talk

Please keep pages like this in your userspace while under development. And try not to add "maintained by OLPC" tags (discouraged in the first place) to new pages, especially when defined in a way that expects people outside the office to contribute to maintenance and mention of external events. Sj talk 09:51, 11 August 2007 (EDT)

personal information

Does a public calendar like this need to include personal availability information? Sj talk

Not necessarily, although it might occasionally be helpful for people to see where others are going to be in case it's convenient for meeting up. Mchua 14:10, 11 August 2007 (EDT)

this is a strawman

It doesn't need to be a calendar, it doesn't need to be a calendar page. But there should be a place for people to wander in and see (1) what's happening with content (and/or the project in general) and (2) how they can help - which usually takes the form of "you can do X before this deadline, or show up at Y, or talk to Z," which suggested a calendar format to me at first.

And (separately) also a place where people can look at to check on internal deadlines and tasks... which is hypothetically currently the google calendar.

Mchua 14:10, 11 August 2007 (EDT)