Org-contacts standardization (was: org-contacts development)

[Karl Voit <devnull@Karl-Voit.at>]

Hi Alexis!

* Alexis <flexibeast@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> i use org-contacts as my primary system for contact
> management. Consequently, i'd love to be able to make use of my
> org-contacts data on my Android phone.

Agreed!

> What would be useful would be an 'official', fleshed-out spec for
> org-contacts data, which handles a greater range of contact-related
> info. At the moment, for example, my org-contacts file makes use of the
> properties:
>
> #+PROPERTY: LANDLINE
> #+PROPERTY: MOBILE
> #+PROPERTY: POST
> #+PROPERTY: RESIDENCE
>
> A search of this list's archives for references to 'org-contacts':
>
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/cgi-bin/namazu.cgi?query=org-contacts&submit=Search!&idxname=emacs-orgmode&max=20&result=normal&sort=date%3Alate
>
> suggests that org-contacts is something people are using heavily enough
> that they're writing code, ad-hoc, to provide functionality they
> require, e.g.
>
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2013-11/msg00869.html

And I also posted a suggestion how to name properties:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2011-10/msg00144.html
... which was meanwhile extended by me to:

,----[ my current yasnippet template for contacts ]
| # name : Org-contacts template for a person
| # --
| ** $1 $2  :$1$2:
| :PROPERTIES:
| :TYPE: ${3:$$(yas/choose-value '("person" "company"))}
| :TITLE:
| :EMAIL: $4
| :URL:
| :MOBILE: 0043/
| :HOMEPHONE:
| :WORKPHONE:
| :PHONE:
| :COMPANY:
| :STREET:
| :POSTALCODE:
| :CITY:
| :COUNTRY: Österreich
| :PHOTOGRAPH: [[photo:$1$2.jpg]]
| :BORN:
| :ITOLDTHEM_EMAIL:
| :ITOLDTHEM_ADDRESS:
| :ITOLDTHEM_PHONE:
| :ADDRESS_CHANGE_METHOD:
| :END:
|
| - first contact: $0
`----

I invested quite some time to come up with this approach. For
example, I am generating my procmail filter by scanning all :EMAIL:
entries and :ITOLDTHEM_EMAIL: (whitelisting). 

With [1] I convert my contacts.org to the VCard format for Android
4.4. I did this using Python because I wanted full control to filter
out (most) data and also to provide a sanity check on all entries
(mistyped email address format, mistyped property names, ...).

However, I currently do have an issue here where only few items do not
get imported on Android. I did not have time to nail down the issue
any further yet since there was no obvious common pattern to
identify missing contacts and Android does not throw any error at
all.

> i'm wondering if it might now be appropriate for org-contacts to become
> part of org-mode proper, rather than simply a contrib, to reduce
> unnecessary duplication of efforts. i suspect that, at the moment, a
> number of people interested in making use of org-contacts might be
> reluctant to do so (or do so more heavily) because it's not an
> 'official' part of org-mode. Yet contacts management seems to me to be
> functionality well within org-mode's remit.

In my opinion, the most important first step would be to standardize
all important property names or enhance any kind of mapping scheme.

  1. https://github.com/novoid/org-contacts2vcard
-- 
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