slides: https://www.w3.org/2020/Talks/TPAC/group-calendaring/
Jean-Gui: Thank you for joining I will present the project, then do a demo of the current tool in development, and then we will have a discussion and go over your questions
Jean-Gui: This tool allows
groups to schedule their meetings but also invite other
particpants
... it enables to send invites by emails and for participants to
add those to their agenda
... you can add more information such as an agenda, join instructions
and minutes
... it also provide a Web view of the calendar
Jean-Gui: we looked at different alternatives and I invite you to look at the report we published on this, let me go over the main points.
Jean-Gui: we started to look at CalDAV calendar solutions, there were some pros but also cons
Jean-Gui: e.g. client support,
and lack of structure of the information
... another issue was how to restrict some parts of the
information, i.e. we want to share the meetings publicly but
not the join instructions
... there was also the privacy issue of sharing the list of
invitees along with their email addresses
Jean-Gui: we then looked at a home-grown solution, it was easier to integrate with our systems and provide a common UI for all, and answers the previously mentioned cons regarding access restriction
Jean-Gui: the cons are little CalDAV support and the handling of recurring meeting
Jean-Gui: this discovery led us to opt for a custom solution which is more flexible and provides a better integration with our website and groups ecosystem
Jean-Gui: Before I start the demo
let me summarize where we are and what we want to provide in
this first version
... meeting scheduling, invitations by email with ICS, web
views for groups and individuals
... no recurring meetings handling in this initial version but
some alternate solution to make it less painful to manage
[Jean-Gui runs a demo from his computer]
Jean-Gui: From the CSS group
page, there is now a calendar page
... it lists upcoming meeting, you can export those as ICS and
change the displayed timezone of events
... clicking on a meeting you get more details (name, location,
agenda, joining instructions, participants)
... I'm seeing the joining instructions as I'm logged in
... and I have the proper permissions (either a participant or
have been invited to the meeting)
... you can also change the timezone
... There is a "My Calendar" view that is pretty similar to the
group events listing page but that includes all my
meetings
... I'm now going to show how to create an event
... there is name, description (that supports markdown),
Location which is useful for physical meetings, dates and times,
timezone
... this is where you would later be able to define
recurrence
... participants: here I can select groups that are invited but
also individual participants, note that they currently require
to have a W3C Account, let us know if we should also support
inviting people without a W3C Account
... you can provide the join link and additional joining
instructions
... you can also add a link to the minutes which can be useful
if you use permalinks and already know what will be the URI of
the minutes
... I'm currently working on meeting status: Draft, Tentative,
Confirmed or Canceled
... so I just created an event which you can see, and I should
also have receive an invite by email
[Jean-Gui shows his email invitation in Thunderbird]
Jean-Gui: here it is, the invite
also includes the ICS so I can add it easily to my own
agenda
... I will not show how to edit meetings as it is exactly the
same form
... Next I will work on a way to duplicate an event
... this concludes the demo
Nigel: Thanks, I'm very exited
about this. I have noticed 2 things.
... 1) most of the agenda items will be related to GitHub
issues, so I'm wondering about the link in markdown
... will you translate from w3c/repo#1 to github links?
... 2) also people can easily add new agenda items from github
issues
... Also searching for a suitable meeting time eg when trying
to meet with another group, tooling around that would be very
useful
Jean-Gui: regarding the link to
github issues that was not something we had planned, but I
could look more into it, and perhaps add this to a next version
of the tool
... you also mentioned that your group has a page to manage its
agenda
Nigel: well we have a github repo for the group meetings
Jean-Gui: so far you could simply
link to the issue list on your github repo with the agenda
URL
... it might be wiser of keeping the agenda discussion in your
github
Nigel: that could work, we need to be clear on which tools does what
<plh> --> https://www.w3.org/PM/Groups/agenda.html?gid=34314 GitHub Agenda
Nigel: challenge is that you can have things at different places so could be a nightmare overtime
Jean-Gui: most of the fields in
the forms are actually optional so allows groups to use the
tool as they wish
... about your comment to schedule joint meetings, we thought
about showing a warning if let's say you try to create a
meeting with the CSS WG that would overlap with one of their
existing meeting, so likely something that would be added in a
next version
Nigel: It would be useful to know who can or can't attend a meeting
Jean-Gui: In a future version we would like people to confirm their attendance and work with the tentative status
Bert: it is nice to add the event in your own calendar application, but from here it would be nice to be able to go back to the web view
Jean-Gui: I agree that would be
useful, I will add it
... I also had a few more questions on my own
<plh> --> https://www.w3.org/PM/Groups/agenda.html?gid=34314 GitHub Agenda
<nigel> Thanks, I've seen that, and do use it
Jean-Gui: what do you think about the possibility of specifying the scribe or the chair from that page?
Brent: I think it would be
interesting as part of a more sophisticated agenda planning
tool
... we currently use a google doc for handling our agenda, so
it would make sense if it was part of a bigger package
Jean-Gui: about the timezone, do you think we should get the timezone info from the user browser or from his user profile
Nigel: I found that part confusing as I was not sure if that would change the time of the meeting, I think meeting should be created in UTC.
Jean-Gui: currently when you create the meeting you select its timezone, while on the list of events you can select the timezone that is displayed but without modifying the event.
Bert: It would be good that by
default everyone sees the same thing so unless they explicitly
do an action to change it.
... maybe it could show 2 times, the main timezone of the user
that created the meeting and another time with "your
timezone"
Jean-Gui: interesting, I will see how that can be done
Naomi: Will this calendar be connected with the generation of links to events to be scheduled?
Jean-Gui: if I understood your question correctly, yes it is possible to add link in the event description but it could also be done the other way e.g. from the TPAC page you could link to those pages
Nigel: I think API access would
be very useful
... to help integrate things a bit more easily
Jean-Gui: we definitely want to provide a API view of this at some point and expand on the existing W3C API, and also have webhooks for when you create events
<Bert> (It's an HTML form, so it has an API already, doesn't it? Via POST, I assume.)
Jean-Gui: regarding creating an event from the API, that it not something the W3C API supports, but you could create the event with curl by sending the proper POST request
<brent> and API would be excellent
<brent> thanks for the presentation
Jean-Gui: thank you all!
[meeting adjourned]
<Jean-Gui> thanks vivien for scribing