The CalSch Working Group is being closed. I believe this is a good thing -- IETF working groups which stick around for years and years tend to shrink and get dysfunctional. Closing the group clears the slate.

This doesn't mean that no standards work is going to get done in calendaring. In fact, it seems quite the opposite since in the past six months there's been quite a surge of interest in calendaring features and calendar interoperability. The new lists I mentioned in a previous post have seen a fair bit of traffic. The access protocol discussion list (ietf-caldav@osafoundation.org )has 96 members and 72 posts in under a month. The other list discussing bringing the calendar format standards to a new level of RFC (ietf-calsify@osafoundation.org), has 85 members and 154 posts in the same time period. I've talked to a number of different companies, organizations and even venture capitalists about calendaring standards action, and there's an interesting roundtable coming up in Montreal.

Since I have been dragging people into discussing calendaring standards for a year now, and published a calendaring standard proposal eight months ago, I feel like my timing, for once, is right. Maybe I'm one of the butterflies furiously flapping my wings to create a bit of wind-speed out there today.