[Imc-uk-features] proposal - an indymedia calendar

[frilby]

hiya,

yes, a proposal.  i want to suggest we give some serious consideration
to creating an open publishing indymedia calendar, with regional and
topical calendars that are based around the current regional and topic
pages.

the reason i suggest this are fairly straightforward.

a lot of posts on the newswire are announcements for upcoming events.
not news as such but things i think people are reluctant to take down
because they don't want to deny these events publicity.  problem is the
newswire has a low ratio of news relative to announcements.  the
newswire should be for news, and news only.

what is more, all too often i think a lot of contributors will seek
advance publicity for an event but then make little or no effort to
provide a report detailing what has happened.  i think an element of
this is that the issue relating to events is visible when it's up there
as an announcement on the newswire.

a calendar page, that was linked from the relevant topic/regional page
would mean that this was no longer the case, so for that issue to be
immediately visible on the newswire contributors would have to post a
news report, which would be an added incentive for them to do just that.

it would also mean that we could allow announcements to remain on the
site without them cluttering up the newswire, since as a matter of
policy any announcement on the wire could be removed.

i know that there is a site - protest.net - and we did link to this from
the mcr site at one time (we do still link to a calendar on the page of
a local newsletter but this doesn't deter people from publishing
announcements) but that site has not been upgraded for a long time and
is not really up to the job imo.

a calendar feature for all regions and topics would help to reduce the
overall workload compared to that for individual regions creating and
maintaining their own calendar pages.  it needn't be compulsory for all
regions to have a calendar feature either.

there might be resistance to this idea in the minds of some, in that we
are supposed to be a tool for reporting events, and a calendar might
alter the caharacter and purpose of the indymedia project.  but then
some regional pages already have calendar pages and having these as a
common feature would simply be adapting to the established practice of
many contributors.  also, we do already have a calendar on the front
page of the site where we place events we think are worth mentioning.
an open publishing calendar on the site would allow contributors greater
ownership of this aspect of indymedia.

in terms of details, i'd suggest that any calendar was made to work so
that it ordered events in line with when the events are to occur rather
than when the announcement is posted.  other than that i think it could
work on much the same lines as posting on the newswire, with regional
and topic tick boxes, editorial guidelines consistent with those we have
for the newswire, prominent links from the also features pages and a
clear statement from the time of implementation that announcements would
from then on be removed from the newswire.

pretty straightforward i would imagine.  any thoughts?

phil