[aprssig] APRS Event Bulletin Board

[Corey Shields]

Robert Bruninga wrote:
> If this gets popular, I wonder it there could be other sub
> categories of bulletins.
> I couild imagine things like this being used:
> BLN#HFNET
> BLN#MDNOW  <== for state of Maryland and a live event
> BLN#MDMAY  <== for state of Maryland and something planned in
> MAY?
> BLN#MD-25  <== might be an even in Maryland on the 25th of this
> month?
>
> So maybe, SORTING and GROUPTING by the actual BULLETIN group
> might be another way to discriminate these.  Originally I had
> proposed putting the state and time/date as the first part of
> the bulletin.  I wonder if making them part of the BLN GROUP
> name might be a more consistent way to do it?
>   

So at the risk of being crucified for a bad idea, let me just throw this 
out there:

There are dozens of ways that a date/time event can be communicated in 
the data portion currently:

"Meeting this thursday, 7:00 PM"
"Balloon launch 8PM Saturday April 5"
"New year's party 1/1/09"
etc..

If you are familiar with Google calendar, they can parse and translate 
event timings like these very effectively.  It wouldn't be too hard to 
create a google calendar and push these packets to it and let it do the 
sorting, then publish a single "event calendar" that could be fed into a 
number of sites or subscribed to by others.

Of course there are problems with this: a mixture of people using local 
and utc timing in their messages, no range with a single calendar and 
the possibility of flooding it with global events (thinking of 120 
different ARC meeting events on the first friday of the month), so I'm 
not proposing this as a solution, just throwing it out there to get 
people thinking.

The easy way out would be to develop a standard as you mention above, 
but such a standard could take years to reach full adoption..

Cheers,
-Corey  KB9JHU

-- 
Corey Shields
High Performance Systems, Indiana University - UITS
http://rtinfo.uits.indiana.edu/hps