Hosting CalConnect to Build the Future of Calendars
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Fastmail hosts a meet up of top talent in open calendaring to advance scheduling tools.
Our calendars, just like our email service, are built on open standards. To help shape and improve online calendaring for users everywhere, we’re proudly involved in CalConnect.
Open standards make it possible for you to bring any calendar to any service you choose and coordinate with people no matter what system they use. CalConnect, a calendaring standards organization, works to keep calendar developments open, so that you have more freedom and control of your data.
Tech experts from around the world gather at Fastmail
We’re proud to have brought together calendar experts from all over the world this year for CalConnect XLVI, hosted by Fastmail in Philadelphia. The event was held in October 2019.
Did you know that virtually every important calendar standard has been authored or edited by members of CalConnect since the late 2000s?! Members include our CEO, Bron Gondwana, and one of our company directors, Neil Jenkins. Fastmail’s own Ken Murchison has been honored by CalConnect for his contributions to open calendaring. Ken is a principal developer of the widely used free and open source Cyrus Mail and Calendar server, and an author of many of the email and calendar standards in use throughout the world today.
CalConnect is for developers, product managers, and members of the open standards community who want to build, implement, and test new standards in calendaring. Members of CalConnect include some of the world’s largest software development organizations and research universities.
Shaping the next wave of calendar innovation
CalConnect maintains relationships with other standards bodies, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). IETF is a trusted publisher of high quality, fully open technical specifications. ISO standardizes time and date formats among many other things.
Bron’s role in CalConnect, and his leadership at IETF as a chair of the calendar extensions working group, keeps these groups connected. CalConnect members drive the work, the agenda, and collaborations at their meetings with the shared belief that everyone wins when competitors work together on the foundational building blocks of our digital world.
The most recent two CalConnect events have hosted interim virtual IETF calendaring meetings, allowing these two standards groups to work more closely together. Many documents produced by CalConnect are in the process of becoming IETF proposed standards.
Other CalConnect members sit on ISO standards committees, bringing their expertise and long experience of date and time issues to the development of the standards used by governments worldwide.
Bringing more to your calendars
CalConnect keeps us on the pulse of calendar development, where we can contribute to advancements and represent the voices of our customers. This means you get more of the stuff you’re asking for faster!
Fastmail’s COO, Helen Horstmann-Allen, took advantage of having the collected knowledge of attendees to discuss our list of potential new features and user stories for calendars and ask how best to implement them with existing standards, or what new standards work might be required.
As you can see, when top technical experts convene, great work moves forward for you and your productivity. Without CalConnect, we wouldn’t have standards that innovate on calendaring and keep calendar specifications open so other developers can take them further.
You can follow CalConnect on Twitter and on the web at: calconnect.org. The next CalConnect will be held in April 2020 in Nottingham, UK.