Peak Oil -- And What Do We Do Now?
Debate on "Peak Oil" and choosing a new Global Paradigm
This group's purpose is to debate the “peak oil” phenomenon and its inevitable aftermath, and how we can help shape a post -petroleum future. This is a global phenomenon and this is a global group. Peak oil is the point in time at which the maximum global petroleum production rate is reached. After this point in time, the rate of production begins a termi ...learn more
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Created: Sep 25, 2007
Updated: Oct 29, 2009
Membership: Open
Semi-Private
Synergize Google Calendar into WiserEarth
Problems
- The development and use of the WE event system will be developer and computer intensive. (Besides the development time required to create and maintain a mature event/calendar system, imagine the computer system requirements for hundreds of events being created, updated, and used in various ways for each of hundreds of thousands of groups/organizations/persons.)
- The current WE event system is quite basic. For example, inside of groups, the system merely lists events, pretty much like a blog.
- This system is almost entirely independent of other event/calendar systems. Either users have to limit themselves to the WE event system or duplicate event postings on their other event/calendar systems, such as on their own websites.
- Currently, other event/calendar systems have great competitive advantages over the WE event system--and are improving at a very fast rate. So why should WE expect people to use its event system?
Discussion
Does WiserEarth invent its own video system? Does it invent its own map system? Just like Facebook, YouTube, and Google Maps, the name of the game is most often not reinvention, it is incorporation: synergy.
Basic Suggestion
WiserEarth should incorporate the use of Google Calendar (GC) technology. (related suggestion Embed a Google Calender)
- GC appears to be the most widely used event and calendar system on the Internet.
- It's already an advanced event and calendar system, easy to use, has a great API, and is constantly improving.
- It has many import, export, and embed functionalities and customizations that both WE and users can use.
- The vast majority of the computer (data, bandwidth, and cpu) requirements are externalized to Google.
- It's free!
Implementation and Future Possibilities
- Each group, organization, and person should have a "Google Calendar URL" field.
- A group GC calendar would have a module to display the calendar (easy to implement, and there are many options). For organizations and persons, it could be displayed in an optional new section.
- Further, GC technology allows you to easily display the events from several calendars on a single (automatically updated) calendar.
- This would allow each group, organization, and person to display a single calendar for a network of specific groups, organizations, and/or persons: a custom network calendar (CNC). (In other words, a CNC gives people the ability to quickly and comprehensively view all the events of multiple groups/organizatins/persons on a single calendar.)
- WE could even allow multiple CNCs to be defined and displayed for each group, organization, and person. For example, a Bay Area group might display both a South Bay CNC (featuring the events from several South Bay groups) and a North Bay CNC (featuring the events from several North Bay groups).
- CNCs will enable groups/organizations/persons to easily keep abreast of each other's events, reduce scheduling conflicts, and foster greater collaboration. (I think this should generate a lot more interest in and visits to the WiserEarth site.)
How I Can Help
- I'm willing to help direct, advise, and even code the project.
Comments (1 - 12 of 12)
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Flag comment for removal Janine 5 months ago
Thanks to all of you engaged in this active discussion of dovetailing WE with calendar in wide use. It's a tricky problem technically, but I think having timely content fed into WE would give everyone reason to best use this excellent resource.
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One idea that has come up in the past is to have iCal functionality on events so that people can easily add them to their calendars.
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Hi, I am thinking about using WE for the different cross associations I am managing or a member off. I curently communicate with members using Google Groups which sends mails to people. But when people receive too many mails, they don't read them and miss the evens. As most of the people knows only how to send a mail and surf on the Web, if I push them to use WE, the purpose would be to allow them to have all the informations visible from a single place including the agenda. Whatever solution is proposed I think that the agenda is a real need for us. |
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It's essential to have more compatibility with other systems. WE should be able to:
However I agree with others here that it might be best to not rely completely on Google Calendar (though I don't have strong feelings about that, for now.)
I've also made related suggestions at Filling up the event database. |
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Hi Honore,
Yes, Google would control the horizontal and the vertical, which could be a bad thing.
As long as a calendar is public, its events can be viewed by anyone. The only trick is that you have to specify that calendar, or a combination of calendars including that calendar.
However, you can easily send events to other groups/people, to ask them to, what I call, cosponsor an event. This means that they can, if they chose to, instantaneously copy the event to their own calendar: in essence, event sharing. Each person/group decides what to do with the cosponsor request. They can just ignore the request or add the event to their own calendar and/or notify their membership about it. Indeed, they could even notify other groups about the event, sending it on to other groups/people. This way, people can get out the word about events via their localized networks of groups/people--kinda like a social neural net, perhaps even a global consciousness.
I actually made a rough prototype of a GC event management system here. If you'd like to see/use its code, I'd be willing to share it with WE under OSI. |
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Hey Bret,
In the past, using Google calendar has been brought up as a very attractive possiblity, but there is one major factor that's always been limiting - and that is we don't own or control any of the content entered on Google Calendar. If Google ever decides to change their terms of use, or if they decide to use it for marketing purposes, or even if we needed to go back and retrieve/undo an action, we don't have that control. Because none of that data is stored on our database, we're at the whims and mercy of Google for any troubleshooting issues. We've seen with the google maps API that there can be complications - coordinates don't get pulled properly, loading times can be unusably long, etc. With google, as nice as it is that they offer free services, they provide pretty poor technical support whenever things go wrong. It makes us wary of depending too much on them.
Another factor is how well it integrates with the rest of the site. Admittedly, I'm not a user of GC, so I'm not a power user by any means. But one concern is how events entered into localized calendars are visible to the whole site. In other words, lets say there are events entered by the North bay group. If they wanted to let the entire community see these events outside of their group, is that possible? Would we have to create something like a "public calendar" for them to share their events with?
Now, having said that, does this rule GC as an option? Not at all - I'm very much in agreement with you that we shouldn't try to reinvent the wheel here. What GC has as a system far surpasses anything we have now and probably will have in the future. But just giving you a rundown why we haven't jumped on GC so far. If you know of any sites that have embedded GC as their event management system, please do list their links - I'd love to look into how well it works in that capacity, |
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@Bret: Good point. Thanks :)
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Hey Bowo, don't let my "battle-hardened developer perspective" discourage your input at all. We all have valid and important perspectives. And sometimes, those battle-hardened perspectives are not the ones people should listen to. :)
PS: The API funding sounds very creative. As they say in New Zealand, good on ya! |
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@sicjedi: In reference to funding, the API funding is coming from the WiserEarth community and WiserEarth partners while general funding for the site generally comes from foundations and major donors. This is appropriate given the way how the API is going to be used and how it does not directly improve the WiserEarth site.
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Good comment. Guess I'll leave the rest to the more experienced/technical guys. Just want to make sure we don't go the way of feature-bloat with this one and that indeed, such feature will be used by the WE community.
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Thanks Bowo for your thoughtful comments, as usual!
Let me share my battle-hardened developer perspective on this. :)
Google Calendar is built to list and share events: Note though that GC does not list events independently of specific calendars. The theory behind this is that listing all events becomes less and less useful the more events you have (for example). It is much more useful to register interest in certain group/organization/individual calendars and see/search only their events.
Integration should not be a problem. For example, creating or modifying an event for a GC calendar would be automatically reflected in everything that accessed or displayed that calendar, even various WE group pages. Users (and WE) can access and be notified of event creations or modifications in more flexible and powerful ways than WE's system. So, yes, GC can mimic WE's system, if desired. Further, since GC is more integrated into the Internet community than WE, WE using GC would leverage the visibility and integration of WE events by the GC system.
WE could, of course, eventually develop a calendar system that would meet all of its needs and desires. The question is does WE have those resources to spare. Could they be better used for other endeavors? The GC system is free, already advanced, and will be updated and maintained by Google (who better?). If WE is struggling to get $10,000 to create an API, should it be reinventing and maintaining a calendar system (a monstrous task) when a calendar system already exists that will (more than, in numerous ways) adequately meet the needs of WE? |
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Yet another fab work Bret!
Here's my not-a-developer perspective on this.
I believe there's no disagreement that Google Calendar is more sophisticated and full-featured in many respect than WE's event system. But I wonder if they're built for the same purpose? I think GC is more for micromanaging events while WE's system is more about listing and sharing them.
There's also the issue of integration level. No matter how full-featured third party tools is, I doubt they can ever be integrated enough with WE's overall architecture. For example, any member can create an event page and easily share that with any group s/he is a member of. After being shared, they will appear in the event module of each group. All edits and comments made to that page is broadcasted to the watchlist alerts of all members of those groups. If they so choose, the alerts can be forwarded to their email inbox. Can the use of GC on WE mimic this?
Next on the list is, should we integrate GC into WE, or should WE be integrated into GC? Or should it be both ways? WE will soon (hopefully) have an API (see OpenWiser, which is an event listing) and I'm guessing it will allow for two ways data exchange between WE and other platforms. So if a group or organization already use GC as their event management system, I'm guessing it will be easier for them to share their event listings with WE via the API? (someone need to code something for sure to make this happen).
That said, there is definitely plenty of room for improving WE's event listing. One biggie that's very relevant to your suggestion is simply the lack of a calendar view for group events! This system-wide listing page could also use some improvements.
And I do think we should enable GC embedding at least for groups and organization listings (assuming that most of them do use GC. Do they?). Better yet, to somehow create a feature that will allow us to sync event data between GC and WE (looks tricky....).
Any other thoughts anyone? |