Re: Volunteer needed to automate the Boston area physics calendar

[Dana S Fine <dfine umassd edu>]

Hi Ken,

I am among those who finds this a valuable resource. Thank you for 
maintaining it all these years!

I can imagine implementing Jake’s suggestion in Google Calendar. The key 
question, though, is will someone in each relevant department agree to add 
events to a shared calendar?

For the rest, setting up a calendar is easy, getting it to send 
announcements is possible, but I don’t (yet) know how to make that happen 
on a fixed day for all the events in a given week. I think the default is 
more like a daily digest.

Best,

Dana

> On Dec 9, 2025, at 10:56 AM, Ken Olum via bapc <bapc cosmos phy tufts 
> edu> wrote:
>
> [EXTERNAL SENDER]
>
> Hi, Boston area physics calendar subscribers.  The bapc is in trouble.
> It seems the best hope for keeping such a calender going is to have an
> automated system where schools could enter their events in an online
> calendar and mailings would be sent out automatically.  But I don't have
> the time to develop such a system.  So it would be great to have some
> volunteer who could work on such a project.
>
> Here are the details:
>
> I've been been maintaining the mailing list for this calendar since
> 1999.  There was a rotation of schools, each serving for two years,
> managing the receipt of postings and assembling them into a single
> calendar posting.  Tufts did it last year.  This year it should have
> gone on to Boston College but they refused to do it.  They said that
> they have not been listing their talks on the BAPC for several years.
> Next in the rotation would have been MIT, but they said they wouldn't do
> it either.  So the current plan does not seem viable.
>
> Jake Mandel here at Tufts going to do the calendar until June.  After
> that, we will need a different plan.  Otherwise there will be no bapc
> next academic year.
>
> In recent years, the number of listings has gone down.  But there are
> 560 email addresses subscribed to this calendar.  So it seems there are
> a lot of people who find it valuable.  I certainly think it's very
> useful to have something that ties together the different area schools.
>
> Everyone seems to agree that the best plan would be an automated system,
> where there isn't a single person putting together listings by hand.
> This would consist of some calendar program into which different schools
> could enter information about their events.  People could then include
> this calendar in their personal calendars, and the system would send a
> weekly email to those who are interested.  There would also be a way to
> send email about talks that were canceled or moved, as we do now.
>
> I don't think this is terribly difficult, but I don't have the time to
> set it up myself.  I'm happy to discuss the design, to supervise it once
> it is set up, and to maintain the email list as I have been doing.  So
> if you think you could set up such a system, or you have a student who
> could be encouraged to do it, please let me know.
>
> I think the 560 subscribers to this list would probably not appreciate a
> high volume of discussion, so please just reply to me.  I'll forward
> anything that anyone sends to other people who express interest, and if
> a lot of discussion develops, perhaps I'll create a bapc-future mailing
> list, or something like that.
>
>                                        Ken
>
> _______________________________________________
> bapc mailing list
> http://cosmos.phy.tufts.edu/bapc.html