Berkeley Campus-Wide Event Calendar

Team Members

• Allison Bloodworth
• Myra Liu
• Nadine Fiebrich
• Zhanna Shamis

The Problem

Due to the decentralized nature of computing on the Berkeley campus, different schools, departments, and other campus organizations often create applications on an “ad-hoc” basis. The lack of campus-wide guidelines and standards for designing and building applications make it difficult for developers to design for interoperability and reuse. Consequently, the Berkeley campus is inundated with applications serving a similar purpose and repurposing similar content but built with different technologies and based on different, and often incompatible, data models. Although this is the case for many types of applications on campus, our group has decided to focus our master's project on the calendaring application.

Characteristics of Primary Users & Their Goals

There are two classes of users for our project: calendar owners, and calendar users. Calendar owners will use our Calendar Management Tool to create a customized calendar display for their website and select events. Calendar owners are usually department, center, or campus organization employees who are interested in promoting the events of their department. They are interested in creating a calendar display to showcase their events that meet their individual needs. Their needs differ based on type of events, level of technical proficiency, and departmental political considerations.

Calendar users are individuals who use campus calendars to find events occurring on campus. These users include UC-Berkeley students, faculty, staff, and members of the general public interested in UC-Berkeley events. Aside from their role at the university or in the community, these users differ based on events they are interested in as well as technical proficiency.

Access to Participants

Due to our involvement with individuals who are part of campus organizations interested in this project, we have excellent access to participants. Jon Conhaim, e-Berkeley Program Director, Jeff Kahn, Webmaster of the UC-Berkeley News Center, several members of the Cal-Agenda calendaring system staff, and two members of the Lawrence Hall of Science staff have been involved in this project for several months. They have provided us with many contacts, and we have already interviewed nine calendar owners. Additionally, we have additional calendar owners lined up to do testing of our prototype. Because most of our team members work on campus, have been involved in classes and activities in many different departments, and have extensive social networks, we will have no problem finding calendar users to interview.

Initial Design Suggestions

Though our project involves a total information system, for this class we intend to focus on the design of the Calendar Management Tool and Customized Calendar. The major premise for our project is that there will be a centralized repository of Event data that will be shared with all participating calendars on campus. However, calendar owners will be able to mark their events as “private,” in which case they would only be viewable on their calendar, or “public” which means the events are available to other calendars to display.

As we are building the event management portion of the Calendar Management Tool that will allow users to select which events are displayed on their calendar, we will evaluate several calendar management systems currently used on campus (e.g. WebEvent, CalAgenda, Calendars for the Web, Plus.calendars.net) and use these and other popular calendaring systems (e.g. iCal, Outlook) as a starting point to determine what an ideal event management system would look like. It will be important that we find an efficient way for calendar owners to search for events in the repository that are of interest to their users. We plan to create an application with an Event data model appropriate to UC-Berkeley which will allow customization of the fields used to describe an event. This will ensure that users aren’t overwhelmed with fields that are unnecessary for their calendar.

The calendar creation portion of the Calendar Management Tool must serve the needs of very technically oriented as well as non-technical calendar owners, as there is a wide range of technical skill level of calendar owners on campus. We expect to utilize some type of scaffolding to meet the needs of these various users. We will allow all users to do the highest possible level of customization of their calendar, and present their options in language they can easily understand. We will also offer one or more standard calendars for users who do not want to do any customization.

The Customized calendar will offer several different display options which will be easily accessed from a main page. This will include a “Today’s Events” section, a section to highlight upcoming “Special Events,” as well as a weekly and monthly view in a standard grid calendar.