[Imc-alternatives] Group calendar options

[strypes]

Kia ora koutou

I volunteered to set up a group calendar for the Alt-IMC project, so we
can track things like irc chat times, and maybe propose and pencil in a
roadmap for the development of the site, and gathering a user community
around it.

Once we have a 1.0 version of the Alt-IMC site up, we could use the
calendar module for Drupal (can we install this on the test site and use
it for now?).  This could be useful as an internal organizing tool for
editorial and tech teams working on the site, but unless there is a way
to geolocate events so people can search for events where they are,
probably not that helpful to users. Ideally a calendar would be part of
the suite of activist networking tools on the site, eg allowing people
from different parts of the world organizing around community gardens to
synchronize an online chat.

As always, setting up services for this project turns out to be an
interesting research exercise. I'm presuming we want to use a calendar
service that:
- runs on libre software at the server end
- interoperates easily with libre software at the user end (eg
Evolution, Mozilla Sunbird, the Lightening extension for Thunderbird etc)
- supports open standards for exchange of calendar data
- is on a server run by a group that is non-governmental, and non-corporate.

I'm presuming therefore that we don't want to use a corporate service
like Google Calendar or Yahoo Calendar. We could consider using services
offered by non-profits like:
http://www.radicalendar.org/
http://www.calendars.net/

Open standards for calendars:
iCalendar (commonly nicknamed iCal): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar

CalDAV (part of WebDAV protocols):
http://caldav.calconnect.org/

Does anybody know of any other relevant services, software or standards
that might be useful to us here?

RnB
Strypes

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