Comment by coldtea

>If you are typically in New York, but plan to be in San Francisco next week, and you make some one-off meetings during your visit, how should the phone show you your “next week” view?

If you add an event while in London that is going to happen in New York at 7pm NY time, you set it at "7pm".

So you see it as "7pm event" while in London - but you know e.g. that this 7pm event concerns your visit to the Mets game in NY.

Then, when you land in New York and the timezone changes, you still see them as 7pm. What you entered is interpreted by default as a timezone-less absolute time. The same if, while in NYC, you set a feature 11pm event that will happen in London. When you get to London, it shows as an 11pm event.

Now, if the event you want to set needs coordination with different people, it could have a toggle like "tag with local timezone" or allow to set an explicit one, and then another toggle to "translate to local timezone to the people you're sharing this with". So, as I wrote above, in that case:

"If it's 2pm for them and that's 5pm for me, I want to see "Meeting: 5pm" at my calendar, not "Meeting: 2pm <some other place timezone>".

And they, of course, should see "Meeting: 2pm" on theirs.

>there’s not one obvious model for representing times across time zones in a way that will make sense to everyone.

Sure there is. UTC. It's just laziness that doesn't have people adopt it.

Shared events should be shown in UTC, and next to it, your local translated time of that (and the name of the place of timezone). Then an easy selector to see it translated to any other timezone.