CS PIM

The statements and opinions on this page are solely those of its authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of CouchSurfing International.

This page is a Request for Enhancement. It is a draft. You are encouraged to find support for it, etc.
After the enhancement has been clearly articulated, and all affected portions of the website have been identified, you may try to persuade a developer to implement it. After implementation it will be deployed somewhere, but not necessarily to the main website.

A PIM is a "personal information manager", a software/application to organize all kinds of personal informations. A lot of common features of a PIM are also available at CouchSurfing. Improvements, Feature requests and more is spread all over the groups and the wiki, but a lot of it is (more or less) connected. So this page is a start to collect all the stuff, to get an overview and to sort out what is needed or not in a CS PIM.

1 Table of PIM features - CS equivalent - Feature requests
2 Possible Features
3 Why?
4 Why not?
5 How?
6 Implementation
7 Interested developers
8 Comments
9 See also

Table of PIM features - CS equivalent - Feature requests


PIM Feature	CS-Equivalent	Feature requests
Email	CS Mailsystem	?
Address book	Contact list and notes	?
Calendar/Contacts: Birthdays	?	see feature request at Bugtracker (more Ideas in groups?)
Calendar: Availability	?	Host/Travel Calendar
Calendar: Appointments	?	Couch Planner
RSS feeds	CS Groupmails/-digest	see also Groups vs. Forums

Possible Features

(More) Integrated Features at the CouchSurfing Website
Maps and GPS support
Exportfunctions
- Printable Notes (pdf, specials CSS)
- Open formats for common software, pda, cellphones ...
  - Map/drections export to PDA, cellphones formats
Synchronization with Desktopapplications or mobil devices

Why?

CS is a lot about communication, that's why communication tools are important
Comfortable technical features can help to concentrate on communication

Why not?

How?

Implementation

Not necessarily as one part of the system. But the single parts must be connected to each other.

Interested developers

I am planning to implement the telephone and email contacts/visibility parts of this. JoeEdelman

I'm currently implementing iCal calendar export for couchsurfing requests. It should be possible to extend this for other formats (including microformats) sometime in the future if there's need, once the general framework is ready. This could also be used for sending out meeting messages, or any other calendar-related information currently available on CS site. For more information, see Calendar integration Anu

(add yourself here if interested)

Comments

I'd consider the option of giving various aspects of couchsurfing.com full interoperability with PIMs via the use of open standards, while leaving the boring details to real PIMs. So for instance the Birthdays could consolidate in a iCal calendar that can be imported either in Google Calendar or in iCal (if you're a mac user) and so on. Same thing for addressbooks. --Bru sometime on 23 February 2007

I agree and I support the use of different microformats, for example HCalendar --Phauly 05:13, 25 February 2007 (EST)