Group Calendars?

anubeon

Greetings All?

It seems to me that the new groups feature would benefit greatly from an synchronised calendar. Are there any plans to include this or does this go beyond Zotero's purview?

Perhaps a separate Thunderbird extension aimed at intra-group communication and organisation (noticeboards, discussion 'forums', calendars, mailing lists, etc...) would be more appropriate. With the Firefox extension focusing principally on reference management only (for individuals and groups) and the web interface integrating all features in one place.

Just a few thoughts there.

All the Best,

Lee.

adamsmith

why would a calendar have to be integrated with Zotero at all? If a group wants a calendar, why not set up something with google/thunderbird/outlook or whatever group members want to use.
It's definitely not something Zotero should put any resources into building and/or maintaining.

anubeon

I'm afraid I disagree.

The implementation of group collaboration features such as online calendars, task management, discussion forums and mailing lists (etc...) would, in my humble opinion, be a great boon to Zotero. It may well be beyond the purview of the Zotero project to move into such areas as group collaboration, and perhaps the developers would prefer Zotero remain a reference manager only. But the two functionalities go hand-in-hand and I think users would certainly benefit from their mutual integration.

Of course a groups admin could use any of the myriad online calender providers and/or group collaboration websites, but why fragment management of a groups reference library and collaboration efforts between two providers? In fact, in many ways the introduction of the groups feature leaves Zotero begging for more robust collaboration features which I hope will be implemented in version 3.0.

Of course integrating calendars in the existing Firefox add-on may be a little difficult, and such a feature would seem a little out of place in a browse. Which is why I suggested turfing out this, and other hypothetical group collaboration features into a Thunderbird extension. Although this would definitely be beyond the purview of the Zotero project, I imagine.

Anyhow, thanks for the feedback AdamSmith.

Regards,

Lee.

bdarcus

I'm with adamsmith. Zotero should make it possible to integrate this sort of thing in other workflow solutions, but this is way out of scope for this project per se. Zotero does not have to do everything.

mark

I agree with bdarcus and adamsmith. From the Zotero homepage:

Zotero is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources.

It can certainly be used for reference management in a group, but it is not clear to me why it would have to duplicate functionality that is (1) not related to its core purpose and (2) available in a lot of other tools that are already out there.

By the way, since you recognize that this may be difficult to implement in the Zotero FF extensio n anyway I suggest you take a look at Thunderbird's calendar tool Lightning and the Google Calendar plugin 'Google Provider' therein. Great for use with groups.

ajlyon

Perhaps some of Lee's concerns could be addressed if there were a way to easily send references to people-- I'm imagining users dragging and dropping Zotero items into their calendar items, emails, etc. and getting more than a plain-text citation. If those citations had embedded COINS metadata, or some other solution, then other Zotero users could quickly import such citations and integrate them into their own workflows.