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1. each Saturday 2. if there is a Creation Review or Release Review scheduled within the next 14 days 3. send a multipart-alternative HTML/text email to the eclipse.org-membership-at-large and the eclipse.org-committers reminding them of the reviews and the call-in number. Include the table from this page (http://www.eclipse.org/projects/) and all the clickable links. Something like this: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/related; boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0005_01C5FC18.12024340" X-Mailer: Microsoft Office Outlook 11 Thread-Index: AcX8RLe1yXXoemyLS9iyWjUC9qS6nQADsQBQ This is a multi-part message in MIME format. ------=_NextPart_000_0005_01C5FC18.12024340 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="----=_NextPart_001_0006_01C5FC18.12024340" ------=_NextPart_001_0006_01C5FC18.12024340 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit http://www.eclipse.org/projects/ Fri, 09 Dec 2005 1600 UTC Dash, Tools for Committers Creation Review http://www.eclipse.org/proposals/dash/ Fri, 16 Dec 2005 1700 UTC BIRT 2.0 Release Review http://www.eclipse.org/birt/ Wed, 21 Dec 2005 1600 UTC Process Framework (Beacon) Creation Review http://www.eclipse.org/proposals/beacon/ 613.287.8000 or 866.362.7064 passcode 874551# Bjorn Freeman-Benson Director, Open Source Process Eclipse Foundation <http://www.eclipse.org/> ------=_NextPart_001_0006_01C5FC18.12024340 Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/projects/">http://www.eclipse.org/projects/</a><br> <br> <div align="center"> <table border="1" cellpadding="2"> <tbody> <tr> <td>Fri, 09 Dec 2005</td> <td><a href="http://www.eclipse.org/proposals/dash/" target="_top">Dash, Tools for Committers</a></td> <td>Creation Review (<a href="http://www.eclipse.org/proposals/dash/Dash-Creation-Review.pdf">slides</a>) at <a href="http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=12&day=9&year=2005&hour=16&min=00&sec=0&p1=0">1600 UTC</a> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>Fri, 16 Dec 2005</td> <td><a href="http://www.eclipse.org/birt/" target="_top">BIRT</a></td> <td>2.0 Release Review at <a href="http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=12&day=16&year=2005&hour=17&min=00&sec=0&p1=0">1700 UTC</a> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>Wed, 21 Dec 2005</td> <td><a href="http://www.eclipse.org/proposals/beacon/" target="_top">Process Framework (Beacon)</a></td> <td>Creation Review at <a href="http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=12&day=21&year=2005&hour=16&min=00&sec=0&p1=0">1600 UTC</a> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>Mon, 09 Jan 2006</td> <td><a href="http://www.eclipse.org/proposals/nebula/" target="_top">Supplement Widgets for SWT (Nebula)</a></td> <td>Creation Review at <a href="http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=1&day=9&year=2006&hour=17&min=00&sec=0&p1=0">1700 UTC</a> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <br> </div> 613.287.8000<br> or 866.362.7064<br> passcode 874551#<br> <br> <div class="moz-signature">-- <br> <meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us"> <meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0"> <meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document"> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; "> <title>Bjorn Freeman</title> <style type="text/css"> <!-- TD { font-size:9pt; font-family:sans-serif; } .larger { font-size:11pt } a:link { color: black } --> </style> <table style="border-collapse: collapse;" id="AutoNumber1" border="0" bordercolor="#111111" cellspacing="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td colspan="2"><span class="larger"><b>Bjorn Freeman-Benson</b></span><br> Director, Open Source Process<br> <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/">Eclipse Foundation</a></td> <td rowspan="3"> </td> </tr> <tr> <td align="right">voice: </td> <td>971-327-7323 (<a href="http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/custom.html?cities=202,188,195">PST, UTC-8</a>)</td> </tr> <tr> <td align="right">email: </td> <td><a href="mailto:bjorn.freeman-benson@eclipse.org">bjorn.freeman-benson@eclipse.org</a></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> </body> </html> ------=_NextPart_001_0006_01C5FC18.12024340--
I worry about spamming the members with these emails. I would prefer to use RSS and let people subscribe (pull) instead of spamming them (push). But some people have said "I don't want to learn yet another communication mechanism (RSS)". Other solutions include: * Setting up an RSS -> email program at eclipse.org and initially subscribing everyone; people can opt-out. * Setting up a second email list eclipse.org-project-announcements@ and initially subscribing everyone; people can opt-out. * Not sending these emails; people seem to ignore them today, so sending more of them isn't going to help.
Another alternative would be to distribute this information as one or more iCalendar (.ics) files. Folks could be encouraged to subscribe to these as shared calendars so that up to date information simply shows up in their Outlook, Lotus or iCal calendars. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar It might be possible to distribute the entry and admininistration of these calendars by using WebDAV, but I've never done that. The calendar files could be rendered as web pages using PHP iCalendar: http://phpicalendar.net/
As I understand it, we are already sending these emails out manually. So the novelty to this approach is not the content, it is the frequency and the automation. Automating the creation of these emails is unequivocally a good thing, IMO. It saves typing and it prevents human errors. I am somewhere between 0 and -1 on the frequency. I think that most of these emails are already heading into junk folders as it is.
Leaning towards Ward's idea, how about a new list whose purpose is automatically sending out iCalendar appointments of eclipse.org-events? These could include: - project reviews - conferences stuff (e.g deadlines, dates) - key releases (e.g. SDK milestones) - meetings What I currently do is create appointments out of each of the above paste that's of interest, paste in the details, and 'invite' colleagues to the key ones. So this would automate that process, and people could simply click the attached iCalendar appointments that they wanted inserted into their calendar. Seems like if an email like this went out once a week with a familiar subject line, and not too many events attached, it could be a simple way of pushing this info into people's calendars.
I'm not sure why this bug is assigned to me, because I wouldn't be implementing the code to do it. Perhaps I should be discussing them with Karl or Gabe and then adding it to one of their queues?
Wayne, this is an old bug. If this looks like something you'd like to do, then we can talk about it. If not, I'll close it as WONTFIX. In any case, it probably doesn't below in my queue since it involves coding.
Google Calendars are becoming very popular for this sort of thing. Should we consider merging this bug with bug 184685?
