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Shepherd writeup
draft-ietf-jcardcal-jcal

Shepherd's write-up for draft-ietf-jcardcal-jcal-08

1. Summary

The shepherd for this document is Peter Saint-Andre. The responsible
Area Director is Pete Resnick.

This document defines an alternative representation for iCalendar 
data (RFC 5545), structured using the JSON data interchange format 
(RFC 4627). Defining this "jCal" representation for iCalendar allows
easier integration of such data with web or other Javascript-based 
applications, and other JSON-based protocols being developed within
the IETF.

Because jCal is amenable to multiple technical implementations and 
interoperability testing, the document is Standards Track.

2. Review and Consensus

The document emerged from discussion within the XML-JSON technical
committee of the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium, where it
experienced early review from at least three participants in that 
forum.  Upon adoption by the JCARDCAL WG, another half a dozen 
individuals reviewed and commented on the specification.

Although it might appear that the document has not received "wide"
review, the population of implementers interested in the topic is 
relatively small (only ~50 people are subscribed to the JCARDCAL WG
discussion list). In addition, the jCal specification was preceded into
WG Last Call, IETF Last Call, and IESG review by "jCard", a sister
specification defining the JSON representation of vCard data.  As a
result, many issues surrounding jCal were first ironed out through work 
on jCard (e.g., handling of unknown structured values), thus leading to 
fewer open issues related to jCal specifically.

The calendaring and scheduling community is very interested in this
specification, there are several implementations, and there is good
consensus to advance the specification to Proposed Standard.

3. Intellectual Property

All three of the authors have confirmed that they do not have direct,
personal knowledge of any IPR related to this document.

There are no IPR disclosures related to this document.

4. Other Points

According to the IDnits tool, there are no downward references.

This document adds one entry to the iCalendar Data Types registry
(parallel to the "UNKNOWN" entry already added to the vCard Value Data 
Types registry) and also registers a new media type "calendar+json".
Review of the media type registration was requested on the media-types
list on January 6, 2014:

http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/media-types/current/msg00563.html

There was no special controversy about this specification within the
JCARDCAL WG, and in the shepherd's opinion both jCard and jCal are
rather straightforward alternative representations of existing data
models.  The two main points of focus in this work have been ensuring
that the JSON representations use JSON in appropriate ways and are
consistent with the existing textual and XML representations.  Much
attention has been paid to these issues within the JCARDCAL WG, and the
shepherd is satisfied that these considerations have been addressed in
draft-ietf-jcardcal-jcal-08.

END

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