Put Agile2008 on your Phone or PDA with Gcal

Agile 2008 will take place this year from August 4th to 8th. With its emphasis on smaller and more intimate sessions for effective learning, the schedule for the annual Agile Alliance conference can be overwhelming. This year it lists about 550 talks, workshops, tutorials, experience reports and papers. One agilist has taken matters into her own hands and offers a public gcal interface to the conference site, one timeslot at a time.

In just ten days agilists will descend on Toronto, to begin shaking their heads over the plethora of choices offered in each of the 15 scheduled timeslots throughout the five-day conference. This time, however, they might choose to leave the big paper schedule aside, using a phone, blackberry or PDA to look up "what's next" using a public calendar.

This reporter has created a Google Calendar for the conference, with public HTML, XML, iCal and Google interfaces. The conference itself made this possible with the summarized schedule on their website. The gcal mimics this structure, and points at the conference site's own detailed html pages, which list all the sessions for a each timeslot. To find out more about an interesting session, follow the links from there to the details of each individual talk or session. So mobile users do need the ability to view html to use this, but the pages are navigable even without tables, for simpler browsers.

How to access the calendar:
as html ( snipurl.com/agile2008schedule )
via iCal
as XML
via Google: calendar name: "Agile2008 Schedule" and ID

or embed it in a webpage (remove blanks in first and last tags):

< iframe width="800" scrolling="no" height="600" frameborder="0" style="border: 0pt none ;" src="http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=61p47sal4gi0o9h83ssgui7e0k%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America/New_York" style="border: 0" width="800" height="600" frameborder="0" scrolling="no">< /iframe>  

In addition, there is a general calendar entry called "Agile2008 Links" where conference goers can pick up useful links, like:

FLICKR
    tag: Agile2008
    slideshow link

WHERE TO GO
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto
    http://snipurl.com/agile2008WhereToEat
    http://snipurl.com/agile2008restaurants
    http://snipurl.com/agile2008bars
    http://snipurl.com/agile2008cafes
    http://snipurl.com/agile2008pubs
    http://snipurl.com/agile2008brunch
    http://snipurl.com/agile2008museums
    http://snipurl.com/agile2008parking

Got a suggestion for the use of this calendar? For example, if someone sets up a Twitter channel for the conference, let us know so we can list it in the Links entry! Send it to us via the Contribute News link at the top of the InfoQ site, specifying "Agile".

Of course, this still doesn't solve the problem of what to attend!
For example, here are the possibilities for just one of the 15 timeslots on the schedule: at 10:45, Tuesday, following the first keynote by the author of "The Wisdom of Crowds":