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1. Report

The first Roundtable sponsored by the Consortium took place on 23-24 September, 2004, hosted by Oracle Corporation in Montreal. This event was not restricted to Consortium members. It was an invitational “Open Roundtable on the Future of Interoperable Calendaring and Scheduling” and the invitation was sent out to a variety of individuals and organizations involved in Calendaring and Scheduling as vendors, customers, standards participants, etc.

Twenty-three individuals from fourteen organizations attended the Roundtable. The discussion was oriented towards three general areas:

  • Do we agree on a problem statement?

  • Are we willing to work together to address the problem(s)?

  • How do we want to go about undertaking this work?

At the end of the two days, the participants had broadly agreed on a common definition of the problem in terms of what had to be done to move forward with interoperable Calendaring and Scheduling, and had jointly agreed to work together to address the problems. The group adopted the following informal “charter” as a synthesis of their discussions:

“WE” will come together to develop use cases, in concert with the users of calendaring products, to shape the technical requirements and critical input to help shape the work taking place in at least CalDAV, CALSIFY, UMA and other calendaring areas. Areas of focus will be calendar interoperability and a definition of a minimum implementation of same. We will also focus on testing and evaluation of interoperability. Attention will be paid to the promotion and evangelism of calendaring standards, capabilities and interop.

The Roundtable agreed to work within the Consortium structure to accomplish its work, and established a timetable for participating organizations to commit to and join the Consortium. Plans for initial technical committees, and a general timetable for carrying out the work, were also agreed.

Represented at the Roundtable were Apple, Duke University, Isamet, IBM Lotus, the Mozilla Foundation, Nokia, Novell, Oracle, OSAF (Open Source Applications Foundation), Stata Labs, UC Berkeley, University of Washington, Yahoo!, and the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium.

The critical mass of organizations joining the Consortium in the following months, both those who had participated in the September Roundtable and others, enabled the Consortium to make its public launch announcement on December 14, 2004, and to move forward with plans for its next Roundtable in January 2005.