Hi Jari,
--On September 17, 2014 at 1:18:02 PM +0300 Jari Arkko
<jari(_dot_)arkko(_at_)piuha(_dot_)net> wrote:
That is, it lists a few likely time zones for people for convenience. In
this case the known timezones of people who are at least going to be on
the call. I’m going to ask the secretariat to do something similar for
the IESG calls, because it helps me and other participants to do their TZ
math. I know I can always click on a link to find out, do the math, or
use the Internet to find out local phone numbers. But sadly there are a
few situations where I might be on a call without Internet connectivity.
By the way, notice when I said *for convenience*. We are an international
organisation but please do not ask us to remove information that is
convenient for many participants just out of principle. And I think we
have bigger problems in the Internet to solve than the announcement
format for IESG calls :-) Unless, of course, we made all items local to
Finland, which I think would be a significant Internet improvement :-)
From a dog food perspective, do these messages include an iCalendar
attachment with the event details? Is there an event calendar on a web
server available for download as an iCalendar stream somewhere? (Sorry I
don't get the emails so I can't check for myself).
As a proponent of iCalendar - a well established and successful IETF
technology - I would like us to use it for all event announcements and the
like. I know the tools folks have support for it for the main meetings, so
some of the necessary pieces are available.
Also, with the backing of a good, reliable source of timezone data (see the
new tzdist working group, and the IANA time zone database), the iCalendar
data becomes the definitive source for the event time and avoids people
having to do mental arithmetic with UTC offsets. Also, the new Calext
working group will hopefully be working on extensions to iCalendar that
include a new CONFERENCE property to make it easier to specify "machine
readable" conference data that clients can use to auto-dial on the user's
behalf.
Oh, and by the way, if we really want to go the whole way and become truly
"international", then perhaps we should also consider having recurring
meetings repeat using a non-Gregorian calendar scale - also something that
Calext will be working on :-)
--
Cyrus Daboo