The University of California last month recognized the UC Berkeley Calendar Network and its developers with the Larry L. Sautter Golden Award for Innovation in Information Technology, which cites the top technology projects from among all of the 10 UC campuses.
The UC Berkeley Calendar Network originated as an I School student project, first in the Info 243 (Document Engineering) course, and then as the Master's Final Project for Allison Bloodworth, Myra Liu, Nadine Fiebrich, Zhanna Shamis in 2004. The students partnered with the e-Berkeley Initiative, UC Berkeley Public Affairs, and IST. Initially, the team began work on a standard data model for a public event. This group began by analyzing 24 different campus calendars, which were representative of the different types found on campus, and investigating existing Internet-based calendar standards, such as iCalendar (RFC 2445). The Final Project won the first place James R. Chen Award for outstanding master's project in 2004.
After graduation, Allison Bloodworth began working with the e-Berkeley Initiative, and the university moved to adopt the project as its main campus-wide events calendar. The campus wide calendar was launched in December 2006, and as of today, 55 colleges, departments, and units have joined the network, with additional units continuing to come on board.
Web server statistics show that in April 2007, there were 26,775 unique visitors who viewed 262,568 pages. Statistics for a year later (April 2008) showed constant growth in traffic with 45,569 visitors viewing 566,743 pages. During the academic year, the network typically includes 750 to 1,000 upcoming events.
Larry L. Sautter Award
The Larry L. Sautter Award for Innovation in Information Technology. was established in 2000 to encourage and recognize innovative deployment of information technology developed by faculty and staff at any of the ten UC campuses, the five UC medical centers, the UC Office of the President, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The calendar network has received other awards including, earlier this spring, a gold medal from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) in the website category, and during the design phase, the IDEAlliance XML 2004 Conference Best Speaker Award, as well the Dr. James R. Chen Award for Master's Final Project.
More information:
- Final Project: "UC Berkeley Calendar Network" (2004)
- Larry L. Sautter Award for Innvation in Information Technology
- " Berkeley’s online calendar wins UC’s top technology award", from UC Berkeley Public Affairs
- "A growing calendar network wins Sautter Award", from UC Berkeley iNews
- UC Berkeley Events Calendar