[uf-discuss] CFP microformat?

[Michael McCracken]

Hi all, I'd like to start some discussion into a call-for-papers microformat.

Here's the problem to solve:

Publications at conferences are important for many academics' careers.
Keeping track of submission and event dates and locations - and time
zones - is important. Doing that  with less effort would be a big
improvement. Right now most CFP's are distributed by email and posted
on the conference web site in a lightly marked-up version of the
email. Possibly the most common way to find out about conference
details is to forwarded a CFP email by one's advisor, who gets spammed
regularly with those emails. There are problems with that system -
email loss, no good filter (there are bogus conferences), checking for
deadline updates is common, and manual.

A microformat to mark up calls for papers could make it easier for
authors to find conferences they're interested in, keep track of them,
and plan publications. It could make it much easier to publicize
conferences, which now involves manually* submitting to various
databases and finding appropriate mailing lists to spam.

I already have a few examples and some notes on what they have in
common - it's not too complex - but I wanted to put this idea out
before I went ahead and created a wiki page, in case someone can
suggest a more general solution that would work better.

One note is that it certainly isn't just an hEvent - a CFP usually
contains at least a description, a list of related topic keywords, at
least two date ranges, and information about several people and
institutions.

So, what do you think, folks?
-mike

* "manually" in this context may just mean "manually telling your grad
students to do it", but still...

-- 
Michael McCracken
UCSD CSE PhD Candidate
research: http://www.cse.ucsd.edu/~mmccrack/
misc: http://michael-mccracken.net/wp/