Now I’m back home after a week of Calconnect. I’ll try to sum up my impressions here, but I think it will take a while for everything to sink in. My team-leader just asked me what I was most surprised by at the meeting, and I had to stop and think for a bit before answering. I think that what struck me most during this meeting was the level of collegiality within the organization. Everyone’s aim was really to solve the problems that arose rather than trying to promote their own technical solution. This is the first standards body I’ve gotten involved in but from what I’ve heard from others is that it’s not uncommon for efforts to stagnate because vendors just cannot agree on how to proceed. I felt really welcomed into the community and it was easy to start to get to know people.<\/p>\n
On the technical side I think there are some areas where I can contribute to the work of Calconnect, especially in the areas of security design and discovery. I’ve joined a number of the committee mailing lists so I’ll be able to keep track of what’s happening in the technical work as well.<\/p>\n
Of the two biggest benefits of me going to Calconnect, the fist was that I started to build up a social network in the calendaring world and got to understand who the core players are. The second was that I really got a kick start into understanding some of the key problems relating to calendaring, which I really hadn’t understood before. There are certainly some fairly critical problems which needs solving before we can consider calendaring to be solved \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n\n\n