The Dear Mr. President Club
Youth and Adults Communicating With Their Government
The Dear Mr. President Club is a resource and community group for youth and adults who wish to make their voices heard in their national and local government. The club creates a social environment in which to discuss matters important to the community and it's individuals, draft petitions and group letters, write individual letters, or make friends in the ...learn more
GROUP DETAILS
Created: Nov 14, 2008
Updated: Aug 10, 2009
Membership: Open
Semi-Private
Filling up the event database
The Event database is pretty empty so far - e.g. currently it has nothing in Taiwan :-(. WiserEarth's organization database started by importing another database or databases - I wonder what the equivalent is for events? Ideas:
- If people and organizations can share a calendar feed (is there
such a thing?) with WE, then WE's calendar will have far more events
and be more useful. Will the API allow this?
- Of course we must avoid items showing up like "dentist" and "date with Gertrude - remember safety equipment". Probably some kind of "flag" or "demote" button would help, and if a user gets a certain number of"demote" votes, then they get an automated email saying "You may be sharing an unsuitable calendar. Please check your calendar details (link) and if necessary create a separate calendar (link to how-to) for events suitable to share on WiserEarth. Thank you for contributing..." etc.
- Being able to read event sites, such as upcoming.yahoo.com, would be good. As many events would not be suitable, the ideal would be to have a section in WiserEarth where events are imported for sorting. Each event can be tagged as irrelevant or relevant by users. If we use a slashdot style of "crowdsourcing" this work, then once an item reaches a certain score it would be removed from the sorting section and placed in the events database. A strong "irrelevant" score and it would be hidden. (This might be more work than needed - perhaps trusted users, those who have earned a certain karma, would have the ability to make a final decision on an event, when it's obvious - a car rally could be immediately marked as irrelevant, and a green tech conference immediately included.)
- Figure out how to import info from local sites, such as SydneyTalks, and local media (Indymedia, community papers, mainstream media...). If they're keen to cooperate WE could work with them to smooth the process. Guidelines would be posted on how to make your event site readable by WiserEarth. Some probably won't be cooperative, but giving credit on imported items might help.
Comments (1 - 5 of 5)
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Flag comment for removal angusparker 5 months ago
@Boatsie: Yes the AOF monster / dragon needs to be slain. We have an idea for that - basically remove the AOF box and replace with a open Kewyword field that autocompletes on AOFs but allows people to enter their own words as well.
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The best practice would be creating an Events calendar related only to WiserEarth Community, how to do it? each member should put together a calendar relevant to his country of origin or the country where he / she is currently resident, once all members have provided their input the database can be merged in order to form the main Event Calendar of WiserEarth however the calendar is categorized by topic and country disregarding the fact that we will definitely create our own new topics such as everything related to teh global warming and saving the nature and so forth. The outcome could be executing a road show event in different countries or cities, and to educate the people to open up their minds to new cultures and new horizons and to learn from each other. It is not an easy task, but nothing is impossible we might end up creating the biggest Event Calendar ever. |
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heres another example of where the AofF drives me crazy! Adding events and adding resources and having to go thru that process of selecting AofF subsets..... More than anything else lately, I want to add resources as I am coming across so many through the DK GreenRoots series. Oftentimes, the thought of going through the AofF just makes me say forget it...
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At the moment the API only allows reading data not writing but that could change. There is already a suggestion to create modules for popular platforms like Drupal/ Joomla etc that would allow cross posting of events. Also, we've had a look at importing existing events from other databases but that don't seem very promising ... I agree with Camilla that a first step is probably to make events easier to create and to 'attend' - then we can start improting data from other sites.
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Thanks for posting this Chris. Yes I agree, the events area is really underused and there needs to be some extra work to get more events on the WE site that can be shared with the community. I also think the event pages themselves need improving too. I look forward to seeing if the opening up of WiserEarth's API initiates the setting up of some sort of WE calendar.
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