linux.conf.au miniconf schedules

In the lead up LCA2010 there was some noise on the mailing list about the miniconf schedules. Specifically about where and how miniconf organisers should (be forced to) publish their schedules.

Jacinta Richardson invested a lot of time and effort in aggregating all all disparate schedules and turning them into a single table on the LCA wiki, which made life easy for most attendees. However, that still leaves the questions of schedule changes and updates.

As a miniconf organiser I kept my website up to date, so an up-to-date schedule was always available there. Luckily I had no changes to contend with, but others weren't quite so lucky and ended up needing to keep three different published schedules in sync.

There is a solution to this problem and it's called iCal. Provided all miniconfs make their schedule available as an iCal feed (Drupal can do this automagically </fanboy>).

The main conference had iCal feeds of the schedule available as well, so any calendaring app with iCal support could have provided a lovely electronic program guide, such as my Zimbra account (see below) or my iPhone.

iCal Representation of LCA2010 and two miniconfs

You'll note the times look wrong. This is because the screenshot was taken in the Australia/Melbourne timezone and the events are all in the Pacific/Auckland timezone, which is two hours ahead.

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