Jump to content

Diff (blog)/Calendar

Add links
From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

The Wikimedia movement of volunteers, organizers, and affiliates carry out numerous events throughout the year. These events, both in-person and virtual, regional and global, are a focal point for creating and maintaining a thriving movement. Events are where we gather to learn, to share, and to make connections across geography, interests, organizations, cultures, and languages.

Finding out about events happening around the world and in local communities is a process with multiple solutions, none of which attempt to be a central, all-encompassing, resource regardless of interest, project, or geography.

We want to provide a place to pull together as many events for the Wikimedia movement as possible through a calendar on Diff. This calendar is open to any volunteer or staff to add events, milestones, opportunities, and occasions of celebration. It would make choosing what to attend simple and be searchable by project, topic, langue or date. At it's core, it would amplify and promote any events of interest to our movement.

We're using The Events Calendar Pro to solve this need. You can find the calendar at https://diff.wikimedia.org/calendar and can login to add events with your Wikimedia account.

This calendar creates a Wikimedia project-and-language-agnostic resource available to all corners of the movement. Contributing to the calendar will be a light process; login, create an event, share. By aggregating calendars across our projects, our movement can get a clear, consistent view into the various activities happening at any given time.

Why

[edit]

Being able to share news of movement events, to gather together volunteers both old and new, and to find out what is happening in the multiple areas of the movement is a challenge. We see this reflected in the Movement strategy recommendations, "Manage Internal Knowledge" and "Coordinate Across Stakeholders". We also have heard a need for a calendar in the past two years alone in the 2021 Community Tech Wishlist (where a proposal for a community event calendar reached #22), the work of Wikimedia Switzerland in developing the on-wiki calendar Cronos, and in recommendations from movement participants as described in the Movement Communications insights report.

There exists no centralized repository of movement events. Each existing solution is focused only on a part of movement activities. Most existing solutions are technical in nature and are not easy to use.

A calendar for the movement serves to help amplify and promote events. It provides a place for event organizers to get their event in front of new audiences and potential participants. Volunteers, particularly those new to the movement, miss opportunities for engagement if they are unaware of events in which they can participate. We see the importance of events reflected in the 2020 Community Insights survey where results, "indicate that our in-person events may support newcomers to feel more empowered, as those who had attended a movement event were more likely to understand rules for content (89%) and find other editors helpful (83%) than newcomers who had not attended an event."

The calendar on Diff will be supported by a core team, and open to contributions by all.

Calendar scope

[edit]

What items are welcome to be promoted on this calendar? In keeping with the scope of Diff's editorial side, "Events about the Wikimedia movement, for the Wikimedia movement". Some examples:

  • Events produced by committees and affiliates, like the ones historically shared the various Wikimedia channels.
  • Events of interest to the Wikimedia movement by adjacent organizations.
    • Such as other free knowledge and open-source organizations in which the movement has an existing relationship.
  • News about Wikimedia partners, the ecosystem of free knowledge and other current events that are connected with the Wikimedia movement and are targeted to Wikimedia contributors.
  • Events produced by the Wikimedia Foundation for movement audiences.
  • Events with an unclear impact on the Wikimedia movement are out of scope.
  • Adding events that exist on calendars elsewhere are welcome on the Diff calendar.

Suggestions on refining this scope are welcome on the talk page.

Required capabilities

[edit]

Here are the features the team think are the most vital. If there are other features you think we need for an initial calendar, or features you think we should look into later, please suggest them on the talk page.

Event information

[edit]

A contributor needs to be able to add the following fields to an event at minimum.

  • Title
  • Date and time
  • Description

Beyond that we recommend the following.

  • Organizer
  • Venue
  • Registration
  • Event website
  • Primary event language
  • Featured image
  • Categories and Tags
  • Price
  • Location
  • Ability to define an event as "virtual"
  • Recurring event (if applicable)
  • Event frequency (if recurring)

Interface

[edit]
  • A calendar-based view of events
  • Need to be able to search events
  • Need to be able to filter events by type and location
  • Allow for comments on an event to foster conversation
  • Need to be able to post and translate Events into multiple languages
  • Need to be able to easily input and manage recurring events
  • Calendar reflects and responsive to different time zones
  • RSVP function to indicate intent to attend (with option to use external registration service if desired)
  • A map-based overview of events
  • A queryable endpoint (API) for integration elsewhere in the movement
  • RSS and iCal export
  • You can login with your Wikimedia Account to add events

Solution

[edit]

The solution for Diff utilizes the open-source The Events Calendar for WordPress by Modern Tribe. The plugin has existed for over a decade with over 800,000 active installations, is well-reviewed, and actively developed and maintained. The Pro version provides access to required capabilities and support if needed at a minimal fiscal cost. This plugin also integrates with Polylang, our translation software used on Diff. This allows translators to login and translate events.

The team supporting this proposal has limited resources, and this solution allows us to implement something quickly.

Features

[edit]
  • Allow users to create and edit events
  • Multiple views of events - weekly, daily, calendar
  • Filter by location or tag, and searchable
  • Allow for tickets (paid or not) and RSVP feature
  • Maps integration with Google Maps or OpenStreet Maps

Outcomes

[edit]

Implementation of the calendar as described gives the movement the following capacities.

  • We have a central calendar maintained by community and Foundation.
  • The calendar will be supported by a Foundation team.
  • The calendar fulfills needs of the Foundation Event Team for managing and promoting events.
  • Integrated into the central movement blog for visibility and integration (Diff becomes news and events).
  • Accessible to any movement contributor, regardless of affiliation (staff, affiliates, individuals).
  • Different events sustain, reinforce and impact each other. Having a good and reliable overview of all movement events will help in designing a global events ecosystem that fosters a thriving movement. This will also highly impact our ability to identify gaps, interest areas, and to prioritize events related grants.  
  • Central calendar for events can prompt more engagement within the movement and cross-affiliate collaborations.

Metrics

[edit]

To understand the impact and value of a Foundation supported calendar we should use some qualitative and quantitative methods to track engagement and use.

  • Measure the number of events created on a monthly basis.
  • Monitor page views and unique visitors to the calendar and individual events to measure reach.
  • Measure of representative events in target areas (geographically, and by topic).
  • Survey event organizers with qualitative feedback.

If you have suggestions for other metrics to measure the usefulness of this calendar, please suggest them on the talk page.

Implementation

[edit]

You can see the calendar by visiting https://diff.wikimeida.org/calendar. You are welcome to add your own, comment on others, and provide feedback on the talk page. Further documentation can be found on Diff.

Future

[edit]

We are aware of the great work from Wikimedia CH on Chronos. It is impressive work and we are keeping in touch with the team as it develops. We also understand that there's still work to be done to get it in a place to use movement-wide. This work is ongoing. It is an on-wiki solution that has resourcing and is making great progress.

To be clear, our proposed solution is not something we're saying is the end of a conversation on where a calendar can live. We will encourage the use of the calendar on Diff, but understand if people choose to use something else. Hopefully it's something you can use to amplify your event regardless of where it is hosted, if you see value in doing so.

On-wiki integration

[edit]

We want to invest in future work to bring calendar content on-wiki. One possible idea is a technical solution that could pull a set of events from the calendar to display on a wiki page. Requesting a number of events and a tag to say show the upcoming five events tagged "Tanzania" and it would display those items in a list view. There may be other options or ideas on integration. If you have suggestions please let us know on the talk page.

Existing calendars

[edit]

This is an incomplete list of existing attempts to document movement events.

Feedback

[edit]

Thank you for making it this far down the page. Please use the talk page for feature requests and feedback. Bugs reports and feature requests can also be made on Phabricator. Please add the #diff-blog tag when creating new tasks.

Retrieved from "https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Diff_(blog)/Calendar&oldid=22054578"