Murray Cameron (Murray.Cameron@csiro.au)
[If these notes are unclear, please tell me – ideally with a suggested change – so that they can be improved for future users and contributors.]
The NSW Branch of the SSAI is creating a publicly available calendar of statistics events as a service to the statistics community. It will include events in NSW as well as ‘national’ events likely to be of interest to members of the NSW Branch of SSAI. To do this we will be using a “Google calendar”. Organisers of regular seminars will be able to add events themselves easily through their own copy of the calendar and the community will be able to see the events by
(a) going to an SSAI website where the calendar will be displayed,
(b) making the calendar visible within their own Google calendar if they are a Google Calendar user, or
(c) receiving a weekly email (through ANZstat) which gives a summary of the coming week’s events.
It will also be possible for individuals to synchronise the NSW Statistics Calendar information with other calendars (eg on phones or Microsoft Outlook). See, for example, http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=98563 .
This document is principally for those contributing to the statistics calendar or those who wish to either add the NSW Statistics Calendar to their own Google calendar or who wish to have a copy on their own web pages. It contains specific information about the NSW Statistics Calendar, as well as links to more general information about Google Calendars.
If you are to contribute to the Calendar, then you need to have a Google Calendar. You can have several and view them separately or together.
About Google Calendar http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/topic.py?topic=15270
If you have a Google Account, just visit the Google Calendar homepage, enter your Google Account email and password, and click Sign in. That's it!
If you don't yet have an account with Google, just visit the Google Calendar homepage and click Create a new Google Account. Once you've completed the process, just sign in to Google Calendar using your new account. [Note that this does not mean that you need to create a new email address (though you can). You can just register your existing email address as a Google account.]
Some people (mostly seminar organizers at universities etc) will be authorised to add events to the calendar. They will need a Google calendar (see above) and will add the NSW Statistics Calendar to it (see below under Users). Once they have a Google calendar, they should send their Google Account email address to Murray Cameron (Murray.Cameron@csiro.au) and he will add them to the NSW Statistics Calendar as a contributor.
A calendar has some constraints for announcements – most importantly, the heading in the calendar needs to be brief and informative. There are really 4 main fields – Event, Where, Time, Description. It is ”Event” which will appear most prominently in the Calendar so I suggest a uniform approach. Some examples:
USyd: K. Pearson – Sem
SSAI: R.A. Fisher – Mtg
SSAI: Intro Bayesian Methods – Course
The “Where” field should give the detailed location and the “Time” should include the time for drinks or morning tea beforehand (but not, I suggest, the time for lunch or dinner with the speaker, if that is an option.) The description can have the details including explanations about times and, I suggest, a link to a map of the location of the talk – probably from a web page on the host institution’s website.
Please note that Google Calendar only shows a finite amount of the “Description” and so I strongly recommend that, if you have a website with the details of the seminar then you put that early in your description.
If you use a Google calendar you can easily add the NSW Statistics Calendar to the calendar you view. To do this, in your Google Calendar go to the Add a friend's calendar field in the calendar list on the left of your Google Calendar and add the ID of the NSW Statistics Calendar [which is a1iqs1c8pj0d418boji3o8kp0g@group.calendar.google.com ].
Once you have added the ID, the NSW Statistics Calendar will appear in your
calendar list.
You can also view the calendar in Outlook. The method for doing this is given at http://office.microsoft.com/en-au/outlook-help/see-your-google-calendar-in-outlook-HA104035602.aspx
The calendar can be inserted in a Web page. To do so, paste the following into the code for the Web page:
<iframe src="https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=a1iqs1c8pj0d418boji3o8kp0g%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=Australia/Sydney" style="border: 0" width="800" height="600" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>
But see below.
Some events in other places are of interest to people in NSW. These will generally be conferences, short courses or workshops. Currently, as an experiment, these are being entered on a separate Google Calendar, but the same web page display can show entries from multiple calendars. To see the combined calendars, paste the following into the code for the Web page:
<iframe src="https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?height=600&wkst=1&bgcolor=%23FFFFFF&src=e8pe6rat7r8hrd29d0r2ficovg%40group.calendar.google.com&color=%234A716C&src=a1iqs1c8pj0d418boji3o8kp0g%40group.calendar.google.com&color=%23691426&ctz=Australia%2FSydney" style=" border-width:0 " width="800" height="600" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>