What I want at the moment is a standard way of representing a person's calendar in a machine-usable form, suitable for sending in an email. I just sent someone a "getting back in touch" email, and I had to find a way to simultaneously invite them to hang out, and convey my scheduling constraints, all in the same email. This is difficult because you don't want your calendar dump to make it sound like you're assuming they'll accept your invitation, but you also don't want to require a second go-around to set up a mutually agreeable time.
What would be best is if I could just attach a machine-readable calendar representing my availablility, and leave it up to them whether to pay attention to it or not.
I bet diplomats have an agreed-upon protocol for handling this kind of thing, but I don't know what it is.
Posted on February 4, 2004 03:01 PM
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That's an interesting question. My first thought was "send a link to the iCal file on my site and describe it as such", which is unobtrusive from an etiquette point of view but perhaps assumes too much about the level of technical expertise of the recipient.
My second thought was "my grandparents are diplomats, I should ask them". So I will, and I'll get back to you.
Posted by: Gnomon at February 4, 2004 04:36 PMSearch for vCalendar and/or iCalendar (Personal Data Interchange). Dunno about the etiquette.
Posted by: Ken Hirsch at February 4, 2004 04:43 PMA link to a web page with your availability. Add a little "wizard" fot people to make an apointment. Sort of a smart page.
As for diplomats, an intermediate is used to avoid the awkward discussions on dentist apointments and the like.
I expect many diplomats have secretaries to do their scheduling for them. Which while probably convenient, is not adequate for your needs.
Posted by: Jesse at February 5, 2004 04:35 PMwhat about this?
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/garfinkel0604.asp
Posted by: drlloyd11 at May 26, 2004 09:55 AM