Lisa Dusseault has posted about how the CalDAV standard that she proposed is picking up a bit of steam:

This is all great news. Calendaring interoperability has languished except for that burst of productivity back in 1998. People are locked into one calendar application depending on what server technology they have available, since there’s no common calendar access standard. Invitations work, kinda, but in practice the problems with recurrances mean that people must follow up the machine-readable text with human-readable text in case a mistake was made between two different vendors’ software.

Good news, but nowhere near done yet — this is just the beginning. Now we need volunteers. We need people to write specification text, review text, and manage the issues. We need people simply to pay attention to the work being done and provide their experience, or simply opinions, to bring issues to resolution.

I’m excited to hear about this effort. Effective calendar sharing is probably one of the major failings of most personal information management systems, open or commercial. Of course, the OSAF group that Lisa works with is trying to change all that.