574878 - Calendar of USA Federal Holidays

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Calendar :: Website, enhancement)

Description

[Rob Craver]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.4) Gecko/20100611 Firefox/3.6.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.10) Gecko/20100512 Lightning/1.0b1 Thunderbird/3.0.5

I have produced an iCalendar file of all Federal holidays between (and including) 2010 and 2020 published by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Import events from the iCal file 'USAFederalHolidays_2010-2020.ics' to add the Federal holidays.
Actual Results:  
Dates imported into selected calendar.

Expected Results:  
Dates imported into selected calendar.

Comment 1

[Rob Craver]

Attachment: The iCal file itself.

Attached the newly created iCal file itself.

Comment 2

[Rob Craver]

Attachment: The Revised ICal File

Modified the ICal file to include the word "observed" in parenthesis in order to better incorporate its use with other existing traditional holiday calendars.

Comment 3

[Simon Paquet [:sipaq]]

Committed revision 72540

--> FIXED

Thanks for your contribution.

Comment 4

[Marcus Yoo]

Couple of comments:

1.
Is this the official "observed" holiday dates?
I suspect that these are actually the federal building closing dates in conjunction with those holidays.
I've always thought that the term observed refers to the day the holiday is fixed that is different from actual or traditional date.
E.g., MLK Jr Day is observed on 3rd Monday of January, while his actual birthday is January 15th.
The the dates from U.S. OPM is the date when federal buildings close and federal employees enjoy day off from work.
E.g., when a Christmas falls on Sunday, the federal buildings close and government employees gets day off on the following Monday. This is different from saying that the following Monday is the official observed holiday (IMO).
If someone can provide official definition of what it means by "observed" holiday, that would be great. (sorry for the length of the post)
If the US OPM dates are really the building closures and government employee holidays, should we still use those dates in this calendar file?
I don't know... I'm kind of split on that issue.

2. When the new USHolidays ical file was uploaded, it only included the new dates from US OPM, and all the original holidays were omitted.

If someone can provide some opinions on #1 above, I will rectify #2, and add in some corrections noted by others and upload the new ical file for USHolidays.

Comment 5

[Marcus Yoo]

Once I get some feed back, I will comment and update new ics file on my original bugzilla ticket https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=452717

Comment 6

[Rob Craver]

Marcus, I'm glad that you followed up.  The calendar I submitted was not intended to replace your original calendar.  My submission contains all of OPM's observed Federal holidays until 2020 as is evidenced by the bug title "Calendar of USA Federal Holidays".  In that context, I believe that the word "observed" is appropriate.

I am happy with either combining the two calendars or keeping them separate but both should exist in some form.  How would you like to proceed?

Comment 7

[Marcus Yoo]

I don't think Simon will go for two separate ics for usholidays, and I would also have difficulty justifying multiple national holiday files. So I'm just looking at option to combine.

After looking at this a bit more, I have some reservations on two counts.
I see that US OPM is listing 10 holidays per year; 6 are fixed on either Monday or Thursday, and 4 are fixed on a date, so they could fall on Saturday or Sunday on any given year.
I added these dates into my calendar and noticed that for the most part, these holidays fall on weekdays, so most of the times, the calendar will show the holiday from my calendar and observed holiday from OPM on the same day. IMO, it doesn't look good to have two entries for the same holiday all over the place just to show handful of differences over the years.

The second reservation I have is the fact that US OPM's holiday observation is similar to how any other private companies would "observe" holidays. It follows the defined national/federal, not define it. To make this point a bit clearer, let me copy one of the statement from OPM webpage.

*** December 25, 2010 (the legal public holiday for Christmas Day), falls on a Saturday. For most Federal employees, Friday, December 24, will be treated as a holiday for pay and leave purposes. (See 5 U.S.C. 6103(b).)

I.e., OPM's holiday observations are strictly for it's employees. It is not a definition of formal national/federal holidays and observations.
So, do we include holiday observations for all the major employers in the US?
Do we include just OPM because it is the federal employment group?
BTW, OPM is an independent agency of federal government, so they do not have official capacity to define federal holidays or observations. They only have the rights to set holiday observations for it's employees only.

Please share your opinions or other information... I want to think about this a bit more before I submit my calendar.
Thanks.

Comment 8

[Rob Craver]

Different calendars serve different audiences.  I'm not sure why there would be an objection to keeping the calendars separate.  Being a Fed myself, I found a calendar of Federal holidays to be more useful to me (personally) than that of holidays in general.  Regarding the appearance of overlap between our two calendars, I think this further justifies the use of separate calendars.  Let users decide what's most relevant to them.

The Federal government is the nation's largest employer.  OPM establishes the official holiday for pay and leave for all Civil Service employees.  Additionally, most civilian companies [that I have worked for] either observed the holidays in accordance with the OPM schedule or not at all.   That is why I believe the calendar is relevant.

If combining the calendars is the only option, perhaps we can devise some form of annotation (similar to "observed") to clarify the three categories of "real" date, official observance and Federal observance for pay and leave?

Comment 9

[Marcus Yoo]

I don't think Simon will go for two separate ics for usholidays, and I would also have difficulty justifying multiple national holiday files. So I'm just looking at option to combine.

After looking at this a bit more, I have some reservations on two counts.
I see that US OPM is listing 10 holidays per year; 6 are fixed on either Monday or Thursday, and 4 are fixed on a date, so they could fall on Saturday or Sunday on any given year.
I added these dates into my calendar and noticed that for the most part, these holidays fall on weekdays, so most of the times, the calendar will show the holiday from my calendar and observed holiday from OPM on the same day. IMO, it doesn't look good to have two entries for the same holiday all over the place just to show handful of differences over the years.

The second reservation I have is the fact that US OPM's holiday observation is similar to how any other private companies would "observe" holidays. It follows the defined national/federal, not define it. To make this point a bit clearer, let me copy one of the statement from OPM webpage.

*** December 25, 2010 (the legal public holiday for Christmas Day), falls on a Saturday. For most Federal employees, Friday, December 24, will be treated as a holiday for pay and leave purposes. (See 5 U.S.C. 6103(b).)

I.e., OPM's holiday observations are strictly for it's employees. It is not a definition of formal national/federal holidays and observations.
So, do we include holiday observations for all the major employers in the US?
Do we include just OPM because it is the federal employment group?
BTW, OPM is an independent agency of federal government, so they do not have official capacity to define federal holidays or observations. They only have the rights to set holiday observations for it's employees only.

Please share your opinions or other information... I want to think about this a bit more before I submit my calendar.
Thanks.

Comment 10

[Marcus Yoo]

[whoops... sorry for the duplicate post above. how do I delete that? anywho...]

Somewhere, and I forgot where, I read that the calendar holidays webpage
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/holidays.html
will be used to hold official national and religious holidays only.
Even though OPM is associated with US government, it really is an independent employer, much like any other large corporations.

Guess we need some clarification from those who are actually in charge of running the holidays calendar web site to see if this belongs.
From technical perspective, I don't have much of an issue with this.
We could probably use "(US OPM)" as indicator.
So, no () markings for regular holidays, (actual) and (observed) when they differ, and (US OPM) for federal OPM employ holidays.
And if the lead organizers say it is okay to submit two separate, I would suggest USHolidays.ics and USHolidays-OPM.ics so that those who are not interested in OPM observed dates can ignore it.
FYI, I have my own WorkHolidays.ics file, which does the same specifically for my employer's holiday observations.

Is Simon following this thread?
Or is someone else the head volunteer for this?

Comment 11

[Marcus Yoo]

new usholidays.ics submitted in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=452717 that includes all fixes, additional holidays, and US-OPM observed dates.