Hello Ken,
Unfortunately, I don't think I am a good candidate to volunteer to take
over, but FWIW I have some comments that I hope are helpful.
I like the idea of a self-serve, DIY calendar that a select set of people
from each university/institution can edit, and everyone can read, but
certain choices of platform would make such a calendar inaccessible to my
entire institution (see below). E-mail works well for us.
You likely know this already but MIT CSAIL's approach is to send an e-mail
to each subscriber for each seminar and thesis defense they have upcoming.
I
get a large number of e-mails from them, most of them coming at midnight.
Maybe this approach is easier for them to implement, but they generate a
lot
of spam if you are only interested in say 10% of their seminars. The good
news is that their e-mails are mostly clustered in time and easier to
visually filter than sporadic mail. I bring this up because if each
university/institution sent a copy of each of their e-mails that they
already send to subscribers to some central repository that would hold the
e-mails and send them out at say midnight, I/we could get a whole cluster
of
e-mails (or perhaps a single long automatically merged e-mail) from
multiple
institutions from a single subscription. E-mail with all of the content
embedded in the e-mail is a good choice for us (MIT Lincoln Laboratory)
because it does not raise security red flags (more below).
Because of MIT LL's release review process for anything we post on the web,
it would seem totally impractical for us to provide a DIY calendar server.
Another comment about MIT LL - we are not allowed to access public file
share servers such as Drop Box or GoogleDocs, due to the lack of adequate
security controls. So if you implement a BAPC solution using these sorts of
tools, MIT LL and other security-conscious entities will no longer be able
to benefit from the calendar. I do not know what our policy is towards
Teamup or CivicPlus. FedRAMP-certified platforms are preferred.
Yet another unsolicited comment - the DIY calendar or BAPC e-mails would be
even more interesting to me if they also included professional society
meetings such as IEEE Photonics Society meetings.
https://www.bostonphotonics.org/
Final unsolicited comment - I wish a lot more seminars were available over
Zoom - some of us live an hour or more way from Boston, and that drive time
drastically reduces the number of seminars we can practically attend.
Thanks to you and Jake and your predecessors - I've been a subscriber for
a
very long time and have appreciated the one-stop location for seminar
announcements rather than having a dozen subscriptions and fielding
individual e-mails from each institution.
John Moores
Senior Staff
MIT Lincoln Laboratory
-----Original Message-----
From: Ken Olum via bapc <bapc cosmos phy tufts edu>
Sent: Tuesday, December 9, 2025 10:56 AM
To: bapc-announce cosmos phy tufts edu
Subject: [EXT] Volunteer needed to automate the Boston area physics
calendar
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This Message Is From an External Sender
This message came from outside the Laboratory.
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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
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