OSCAL is an inspired bit of afternoon hackery that turns your personal conference scheduling into a social experience by bringing a little of Amazon’s “people who bought this or that…” Browse the Open Source Convention by day, tag, popularity, speaker (I love the speakers cloud), etc. Read the comments and meander related sessions. Build your own personal conference calendar and share it with others.
This brings to mind the original “build your own schedule” system of the original Perl conference (if memory serves). It was heavy, required a lot of effort to maintain, and quickly fell by the wayside. Compare that with the confluence of Ruby on Rails-style (or your preferred brand of) agile development and the ubiquity of iCal (.ics), RSS, and a plethora of other microformats that make this sort of afternoon hack not only possible, but relatively simple to pull off.
Update: Here’s my schedule. You’ll notice OSCAL can’t actually solve conflicts in your own schedule ;-)