Exciting Activist Calendars, Meetings, Repeating Events, oh my!

This has larger implications beyond the Activism Network software.

Nobody, to my knowledge, has done a good job of creating an activist calendar that is used by a lot of organizations. There are a lot of calendars that are used by only several groups, but nothing with breadth.

(Please correct me if you know of a good example.)

For instance, there are a lot of IndyMedia sites. They generally have a calendar, however the calendar is only used by a small number of groups. An exception to this is Seattle - which is weird because they're actually using a pure text calendar (not calendar software).

Repeating events - does it make sense to fit them in to your regular calendar or should they be treated seperately? A lot of local calendars end up with a lot of repeating events in them. If you listed every group meeting, and every sub-committee meeting for every group - you'd have a LOT of meetings in most cities. One-time events involve more planning, are generally more special, and involve more people than the average repeated event. If you want an exciting local calendar, it makes sense that you'd want it to not be full of meetings!

Note: there are some repeating events that are very worthwhile. For instance, Vancouver, Canada has an annual peace march. There are other such events (conferences, protests, days of action) however they tend to not fit so well with calendar software - because it is hard to predict the exact date of the annual event in advance (ex. does the SOA protest always fall on the third Sunday in November, or is it sometimes the second Sunday?).

One logical solution is to treat meetings and one-time events seperately - however, I haven't seen any sites that do this.

Another solution is to downplay meetings. So long as a healthy super-majority (say 80%) of your events are not meetings, your calendar will be appealing to users.

All of this goes partially to demonstrate one of the problems I'm facing as I'm considering adding repeating events to the Activism Network software. Do we really want lots of group meetings to be included? I don't know!

Will the group meetings information stay accurate? How often do groups change their meeting place or time? Will people actually look for group meetings online and attend them? Typically it takes knowing someone in the group and being asked by a real person, before you go to a meeting - particularly in larger cities (in smaller communities, and universities, I suspect people are more likely to get involved without knowing anyone).