Digest News: The Following Post Has a Techie Geek Alert Level 4...

The issue before the SCUU techies, a merry band of techies, "Can we automatically generate the digest from the announcements that go into the order of service, the blog, or our online calendar?"

JP writes: "Yahoo Groups is oriented towards group use. It is also ad-driven and does not support calendar merging the last time I checked. Google Calendar seems powerful and explicitly supports multiple calendars; I had hoped the calendars would be set up along functional (committee) rather than geographic (i.e. rooms) lines but perhaps that can be revisited.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/googlecalendar/tour4.html
and
http://www.google.com/intl/en/googlecalendar/tour5.html

Google in particular seem to address sharing calendars effectively and subscribing to calendars.

http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=41208&topic=8606

addresses sharing with the world; if the calendars for the different committees/rooms/whatevers were all under ONE google ID, then the shared calendar for that one google ID would display all events from all calendars.

Regarding "resource calendars" (i.e. rooms), the following topics provide guidance (again, this seems to be within one google ID, but I could be wrong):

http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=44108&topic=8606
and

http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=44105&topic=8605

Regarding notification, that seems to be the major downfall of Google Calendar, but I haven't researched this in depth. It seems that folks who (a) have a google ID, and (b) subscribe to a calendar would receive notifications, but that's unclear to me. There are export options which would allow us to export events to another application and send out announcements using that feed. I am especially wary of creating an email per calendar change; we've successfully kept people on the announcements list by controlling the volume of email. However, a dump once or twice a week could work provided we (calendar updaters) are disciplined about
formatting event info consistently.

Sorry if I'm dragging people through options and functionality that has already been fully researched."

Spence writes: "Perhaps you're correct about the committee versus the resource. I can see advantages either way and I am willing to change if people what to. At the time most people (in my perhaps faulty memory and/or judgement) liked the color coding on the rooms. It can refuse to give you a room if its already reserved, a slight advantage. But I'm happy to revisit, especially if we need more security; having it done by committee would have traceability.

As far as notices, you can set them up to notify your (calendar owner) email of new events, and I think It's set up that way (I just picked that) but it goes to google@scuu.org which I don't see.

But I would think that we could easily (well, feasibly) auto forward those emails to a google group(s) that then did a digest weekly. We'd want people to always put nice notes in the calendar and even then we might get formatting problems in the digest - it would probably have irrelevant email headers on every digest message.

Just a few thoughts."

JP writes:

"Google Groups was more analogous to Usenet for a long long time, but the new functionality looks great and largely similar (although even better I think) than Yahoo! Groups. I can mass-add the addresses from the prior list, so translating them over may not be a big deal. We get RSS feeds for free!

I think we can use resource calendars for the rooms, but that makes sense only if we use one google ID, rather than different ones for all the committees. Personally, I'm not worried about different committee chairs messing each other up ;-) eventually, we'll probably have all calendar items go to one person for addition to the calendar anyway.

The forwarding notices sounds like one strategy that could work; another that could work is a calendar export & parse which may be trickier to set up but would give us more control."

Please note: Hopefully we get an answer soon. I like the idea of sending the digest out composed of links to a webpage. We'd still send out the digest weekly. I also like the idea of distributing the creation of the information, the publishing of the information, to many members within the congregation; a decentralized approach.

The wheels keep turning. Hopefully we arrive at a solution soon.