Whale of a Time
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Dear friends, We organise creative workshops on environmental issues and eco-events to promote Whale of a Time Artists. Whale of a Time aims to connect people with the Art of Nature. Whale of a Time Events are creative fun whilst getting in touch with environmental issues featuring Whale of a Time Artists. All our artists write songs that connect peop ...learn more
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Created: Apr 28, 2008
Updated: Mar 22, 2009
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Ways to improve Events section
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This is a space to discuss potential improvements for our Events feature on WiserEarth.
Two main challenges:
1) Ongoing events: Event ranges can last for months or years. The sorting feature then moves the events under "Upcoming by Date" up to the top, so that the ones with the earliest start date are always at the top until their end. This effectively hides shorter events on the second or third pages, or sometimes amidst the much longer ones, so they disappear without notice.
2) Definition of an event: Event parameters are not defined. Many of the events posted, such as ongoing courses, might be better served as resources or as part of organizations or on a group bulletin board.
Potential solutions:
1) Separate search areas, one for day-long events, one for weekly, one for ongoing events. This tactic is employed by Whatsonwhen, a smaller event site.
2) Only allow one-day events, with the option to make events "recur" so that they appear weekly, monthly, customizably, or annually rather than a range. This would create a new page for every time the event recurs, so each instance disappears after the day passes. Our search feature might need to be optimized to do this. This technique is used by Eventful.
3) Rather than the calendar displaying the events "on or after" a certain date, only display the events per day, and be able to see how many events are listed for each day. This method is used by GreenPages.
The one-day limit, with the recurring option, seems to work well for event-specific sites. For courses and other ongoing workshops, which seem to be a common challenge, perhaps we could suggest these be posted as resources with a short recurring event during the period that the class can be applied for.
Additionally, perhaps we could add a short description of an event versus a job/resource/org, which seem to be the most commonly confused. Volunteer jobs are commonly posted as events, as well as resources like petitions or organization websites to visit.
Please feel free to suggest other working models you've observed, either here or in the comments section!
Here is a link to one of the other discussion pages about events, which addresses the number of events postings in the database.
Comments (1 - 2 of 2)
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Flag comment for removal angusparker 3 months ago
Rehan suggested and Honore and I agreed that the solution to this problem was to order search results for events according the the proximity of the start date of an event to the date that was searched for. So an ongoing event that lasts a year will go down the list versus an event for the specific day selected by the searcher. We will tweek as the search results are tested and used but I think this solves most of the problem that Kerry brings up.
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Thanks for this wonderful research Kerry! This is more complex than I thought!
Trying to recap in my head, event types can be based on:
Based on this, it seems that event creation page should have three layers of data entry, which would determine how an event will be displayed in the public listing. e.g. one-time month-long whole-period event may only need to be publicly listed at their starting date?... while recurring-weekly, year-long, any-one-time event would get listed every start date of the week?
Some thoughts on how to display events:
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