It has been suggested that organisations in the capacity development community might pool our efforts to produce and maintain a joint calendar of events of interest to the community. The intention here is to reduce duplication of effort and spread the workload. This wiki page is intended to capture our requirements for such a calendar.
How do we manage data entry to the calendar?
Who does the data entry? Should it be open to all (as CapacityDevelopment.ning.com is) or restricted?
What rules do we need about the kinds of events that could be included?
Do we need quality control procedures? If nothing else to make sure that we don't have duplicate entries, and that we don't have things entered that are not within our scope?
Information that needs to be recorded about events
Event name
Location (free text, usually just the name of a city)
Date of event (start and finish)
Description of event (large amount of free text)
Type of event: meeting, training, ...?
Scope of event: local, national, regional, international
How else might we describe events so that users of the information can easily pull out information about events of interest to themselves?
How do people access the information in the calendar?
The calendar must be queryable as a web service, producing xml responses, so that any network member can retrieve, filter, process, and display event information. Any organisation could pull out the information and display it or any subset of it on their own web site.
Existing examples of calendars
CapacityDevelopment.ning.com has a structured and searchable events calendar (you must be a member of the site to view events) and provides an Atom newsfeed
Capacity.org has an unstructured events list (i.e. information about events is entered as a block of text)
LenCD.org has a structured events list (i.e. it is based on a database with date fields and other fields) with the ability to attach files to event pages and to generate a newsfeed of events
Thanks for opening up this discussion and space for more effective collaboration. Here is my initial feedback:
I think data entry should be open to 'all' (that is subject to initial registration and 'vetting' by LenCD). It also follows that there should indeed be quality control of some kind to keep the information relevant and well organised. This does bring up a concern, however, about relevance and manageability. With time, the events listed might become so many and diverse as to be almost meaningless. So I think a proviso for setting up an open calendar should be that all event information should be tagged according to a list of pre-determined topic categories (so i agree with the final point above).
About the information to be recorded, its difficult to be precise enough to fit all possible eventualities, so I would suggest a basic template as above, but with an extra (optional) field to enable people to post any other relevant information. Its also important to include fields for contact information of the host organisation and for uploading relevant documents (pdfs).
Comments
initial feedback from Capacity.org
Thanks for opening up this discussion and space for more effective collaboration. Here is my initial feedback:
I think data entry should be open to 'all' (that is subject to initial registration and 'vetting' by LenCD). It also follows that there should indeed be quality control of some kind to keep the information relevant and well organised. This does bring up a concern, however, about relevance and manageability. With time, the events listed might become so many and diverse as to be almost meaningless. So I think a proviso for setting up an open calendar should be that all event information should be tagged according to a list of pre-determined topic categories (so i agree with the final point above).
About the information to be recorded, its difficult to be precise enough to fit all possible eventualities, so I would suggest a basic template as above, but with an extra (optional) field to enable people to post any other relevant information. Its also important to include fields for contact information of the host organisation and for uploading relevant documents (pdfs).
Kind regards,
Wangu Mwangi, Capacity.org