One constraint that our project must take into account is the unique environment it must operate in: the university. Most universities, including the University of California, have a decentralized administration structure which is designed to allow intellectual freedom and encourage innovation. This means that campus departments and organizations often have the authority to decide internally how they would like to do business.

At U.C. Berkeley there are very few formal guidelines about how websites or web calendars should be set up, and few resources, such as centralized databases, which can be shared among the various campus departments and organizations. Although U.C. Berkeley has a "webnet" mailing list for web designers and editors, there seems to be little formal sharing of knowledge among different organizations. Because there are few standards set from above, most of these organizations create their applications and websites in isolation with little to no thought about how they might work together. Indeed, it would be very difficult to coordinate them without help from above.

In order to deal with this unique environment where community-wide standards seem to be adopted in a grass-roots fashion, we have viewed all work on our project as part a larger marketing process. We have involved as many campus calendar owners as possible in all phases of our project including the Event modeling process and the needs assessment, iterative design and usability testing of our tool. We plan to continue encouraging this level of involvement during future phases of this project. We believe that integrating the input of all campus calendar owners throughout the development process is a critical step towards encouraging adoption of our system.

Our survey of campus calendars during the Event modeling process revealed that calendars on the U.C. Berkeley campus exhibit a wide range of technical complexity. Some calendars have sophisticated payment systems and event data which is very specialized to their domain. Other calendars are simple static HTML pages which are simply lists of events. There are also many organizations on campus that do not currently have calendars, often due to a lack of available resources to create them.

In order to meet the needs of calendar administrators with this wide range of technical needs and expertise, our system outlines two processes by which different types of campus calendars can share event information with each other. For "low-tech" calendars we have created a centralized repository to store event information which is based on our Event data model, as well as a Calendar Management Tool. This tool will allow calendar administrators to both manage event information and create their own customized, web-based calendar which will integrate smoothly into their current website by incorporating the website's look and feel. For "high-tech" calendar owners who have specialized web development needs, or a need to maintain their own repository of event information, we outline a process by which they can send event information to, or pull information from the centralized event repository using an XML document which is also based on our "event" data model.

U.C. Berkeley has created some guidelines for developing campus information systems. The UC Berkeley E-Architecture Guidelines state that "Connector-emphasized, n-tier systems, based upon the J2EE framework, that adhere to authentication, authorization, and data exchange standards will be the easiest to integrate into the new architecture." Although our prototype will not exhibit any of these characteristics, all specifications we develop for our system will reflect these constraints.^[1]