Introduction

GridCalendar (abbreviated as GriCal) is a community website where anyone can share information about interesting events. It has a strong focus on scientific and  FOSS-related conferences, using  Free Software, and  Free Data, and  Free Formats.

In the past we used the name CloudCalendar (abbreviated as CloCa)

Community

• chat:  irc://irc.freenode.org/calendar
• list:  http://lists.gridmind.org/listinfo/grical

Goals

Basically, we created this project because we want to be able to openly and freely share events information and manage them within our calendars, communities and the world. The main features are:

• Software freedom: The license of the software is free as in  Affero General Public License.
• Data freedom: The license of the public data is free as in the  Creative Commons Licences
• Community oriented:
  • Everyone can colaborate in the project
  • Everyone can create, update and delete events (log in and set a filter to be notified if someone changes an event you care about)
  • Everyone can create groups
• documentation: We document our work including our design decisions and our analysis of other calendar sites, to ensure reuse of the data and experience.
• Openness: All public data can be downloaded easily in several formats.
• Diversity: There are several means for input and output to accomodate as many people as possible.
• Internationalisation: We aim to be multilingual.

Support / help

We really need help. There are many ways to help the project. Some ideas:

• Add events and improve the data of the current events
• Easy and fast but costs money: donate
• Maintain and improve our servers
• Promote GriCal in conferences, etc.
• improve the source code

Source Code

You can get the source code using

hg clone http://dev.grical.org:8001 gridcalendar

Other Calendars

We have analysed some of the features of other online calendars. See OtherCalendars

Features

See FeaturesList

Data Structure of an Event

See DataFormats

Alternative software

A list of foss software related to calendars:

•  Calendar and Contacts Server
•  The project description of Zentralkalender
•  calagator
•  Bebework: floss, CardDAV server, Timezone server
•  Rainlendar: floss, desktop calendar application (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X) that can connect to online calendars (in the Pro version of Rainlendar) and also edit its entries including Google Calendar, Remember The Mik and others.
•  WebCalendar: a PHP Server Calendar that can be used for many porpuses. Multiuser; import-export iCalendar, vCalendar, Palm, hCalender; can subscribe to remote calendars
•  Virtual Web Calendar (VCalendar): a PHP Server Calendar for showing calendars including events with categories
• Mozilla Calendar: client
• Sunbird: client
• Python packages (libraries):
  •  iCalendar package for Python
  •  vobject, another ical and vcard library
  •  blog entry with good comments about ical and python
  •  python-dateutil
•  Calendar Server: a DevCal and contacts server in python. Has a reusable library.
•  Kronolith: a php, gpled web application

Other non-free software:

•  JEvents plugin for  Joomla. Just  Open core.
•  localendar.com
•  trumba.com
•  web calendar pro

Organisation

Once this project is in a more advanced state, setting up an organisation will be necessary, like a German Limited ( Unternehmergesellschaft haftungsbeschränkt), which can also be for the public interest ( Gemeinnützigkeit). See also  Gemeinnützige Gesellschaft.

We document promoting activities and mentions of GridCalendar. See OnVisibility .

Timeline

• 2009-06-29: 1st Meeting at FFII Berlin office: Ivan, Mario, Sven
  • Ivan agreed to set up this wiki and start with a minimal proof of concept at  http://gridcalendar.net (was  http://cloca.net)
• 2009-10-01: 2sd Meeting at FFII Berlin office: Ivan, Sven.
  • revamped the page. working on the features list.
• 2010-02-23: As the code is almost in an usable state, a preliminary business for setting up the German Limited was registered.
• 2012-01-02: Version 0.9 commited to the main repository

See also the automatically generated  Trac Timeline

Calendars

Examples of potentially interested communities or calendars. See OnCalendars