Cal Connect - History

History

In 2003, Patricia Egen, SHARE’s liaison to the IETF and a participant in the IETF Calendaring and Scheduling Working Group (calsch), and David Thewlis, SHARE’s Chief Standards Officer began exploring ways to revitalize the calendaring standards work that had been somewhat languishing in calsch. Thewlis and Egen enlisted Pamela Taylor as a potential board member and incorporated CalConnect in January 2004 to promote interoperable Calendaring and Scheduling. Other interested parties, most notably from Oracle Corporation, IBM Corporation, the University of Washington, and Duke University, were among the founding members and helped recruited others to become members.

CalConnect saw its public launch in late 2004, with sixteen founding members from commercial and open source vendors, and leading research universities –- Duke University, EVDB (Now Eventful), Isamet, NASA Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), M.I.T., Mozilla Foundation, Novell, Oracle Corporation, Open Source Applications Foundation, MeetingMaker (now PeopleCube), Stanford University, Symbian, University of California Berkeley, University of Washington, University of Wisconsin, and Yahoo!.

Roundtable I, which was held September 2004 in Montreal, Canada, was the invitation-only meeting held during the formation of the Consortium and prior to its first member meeting. Roundtable II, held January 2005 in Seattle, Washington was the first member meeting of the Consortium.

The first Interoperability Test Event sponsored by and held under the auspices of CalConnect, testing of RFC 2445, RFC 2446 and RFC 2447, was held in Berkeley, California in July 2004, thus predating the actual formation of CalConnect itself. Prior to the founding of CalConnect, the calsch Working Group of the IETF held three IOP Test Events before going dormant.