Some thoughts on calendaring and life in a community

I’ve been thinking a lot about calendaring for the last year or so and what most interests me is the way that calendaring can serve as a catalyst for community building.

To grossly over-simplify my thesis here: Calendaring is about managing events. Events can be used to bring people together. Communities can flourish when people come together.

As a type of relationship between people, community isn’t a thing you can necessarily point to. It has attributes and properties but it is never something that you can pull out an examine in isolation from the people that make it up. Events, however, give communities a presence in time. They give communities a past, present and future. Being able to view a community’s events substantiates the otherwise invisible relationships among people and places.

Technorati Tags: calendaring, eventful, Monmouth County, New Jersey, placemaking

Capturing events, then, would seem to be a pretty important goal for anyone interested in community building. It also appears that web-application developers have realized just what fertile ground calendars can be as a repository of community-related information. The choices available in online calendaring tools is massive and confusing. For me though, calendaring comes down to:

• capturing event data

• discovering event data

• sharing event data

Importantly, I think the above three activities need to be applied to past, present and future events. Meaning, I think capturing photos or other data from current community events and housing them for review is valuable. For the current discussion though, I’m concerned mostly with present and future events.

When I look at the spectrum of online calendaring apps I’m a bit disappointed that no one applications gets all three of these things right. Google Calendar, for example, is awesome at capturing event data. I can send a text message to my calendar from my cellphone along the lines of “meeting in Red Bank Friday at 1PM” and it will be added to my calendar. Ubiquity of capture points and ease of capturing is what were looking for on the input side. Google is easy and almost ubiquitous. Eventful on the other hand is a bit more difficult to enter data into and its entry points are far from ubiquitous. However, what Eventful lacks in ease of entry, it easily sails past Google and most other online calendars in ease of sharing data.

By adding an event to Eventful, I can easily send that event data out to technorati, upcoming.org, Google, etc. That’s pretty potent sharing. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that the relationship between the event and its shared-out copies is maintained over time, so that if I update the event on Eventful, those changes are not replicated out to the sites I shared the original event with.

In addition to doing a one-way share with a lot of other event data sites, Eventful also outclasses Google in the number of formats it makes its calendar data available in. Atom, RSS, ICAL and CSV are all provided as ways to syndicate and share event data. Google’s calendar is limited to ICAL and vanilla XML, which are both useful but not as friendly to aggregators.

This leads me to believe that neither tool is spot-on perfect for every situation. A recent thread on TechSoup’s list-serve solidified my thinking on this. In short, I think Google is great for personal calendar that extends out to very small groups of a fixed size (like a family calendar) or large groups with very centralized authority (the latter, of course, a dying breed of organization). I think Eventful is more likely the correct tool for groups of all sizes that seek to widen their participatory audience. Meaning, with a tool like Eventful, there is no barrier between discovering a group’s events and creating events for that group. The hurdles to do the same on Google are a bit more top-down and centralized (which is not always a bad thing).

Now that my work running Banyan Social Technology is gaining some traction, I’m just now applying the accumulated knowledge of a year of marinating on calendaring. Last week I met with a local community arts group to teach them how to use Eventful as a way to centrally manage their events. The goals here are multiple:

• get a sense of how user-friendly Eventful is for the layperson

• investigate syndication of centralized event data as a way to publicize events to a broader audience (e.g. get local media outlets and non-profits to subscribe and promote the events calendar)

• investigate whether broader awareness of events helps communities flourish

This latter point on flourishing is especially interesting given the recent finding that local authorities that keep their residents informed and updated on efforts to reduce anti-social behaviour will have happier and less fearful residents. My thinking here is that members of a community that are kept informed and updated on events (and efforts to promote events) will feel more involved and find more entry points into the fabric of their communities. One hopes ;-)