[bestbits] Internet Events Calendar

[Jeremy Malcolm]

On 16/08/2013, at 10:57 PM, Grace Abuhamad <grace.abuhamad at gmail.com> wrote:

> As part of my work for the GovLab @ NYU, I've compiled information about upcoming Internet events into a calendar. I understand this was a project attempted in other groups as well, but I wanted to go ahead and share our product with you: http://www.thegovlab.org/events/

Great!

> If you have any events you would like to add, please send the information along to me. We are still thinking of ways to make a open calendar compatible with our website.


This can be done automatically by importing the events from the Best Bits event calendar, and the reverse can also be done - in other words adding your calendar as a source for events shown in our calendar, which I've just done:

http://bestbits.net/events/

We already have nine other calendars - now ten - feeding events into ours (although their events are hidden by default): Internet Governance Caucus, Access, Fight for the Future, IGF Community Site, Consumers International, Diplo Foundation, Infojustice.org, Internet Governance Project and RIPE NCC.

To see events from external calendars you need to change the "Categories" drop-down filter to include "Events from other calendars" and then chose the other calendar from the "Tags" drop-down.  But the idea is that the moderators of the calendar will periodically move imported events out of this category and into a more appropriate category so that they will become visible.

Currently our other categories are ICANN, IGF, ITU, Non-institutional forums, UN and WSIS Review - but we can add more.

Other features that are due to be rolled out soon are:
RSVPs: This is the most useful improvement - we will show who is attending each upcoming meeting.  If you RSVP for any meeting, you will also receive information about travel support opportunities.
Institutions: The hosting institutions for meeting will each have a wiki-style page of information about them that carries across all the meetings that they host - and later, a map/infographic will be linked in.
Event Issues: Similarly, each event can have issues associated with it.  These are more fine-grained than categories, and are designed to capture the particular topics that a meeting will discuss.
Reports, Event Papers & Detailed Event Pages: Some events can have a detailed page associated with them, generally because a Best Bits gathering is taking place there (example: http://bestbits.net/bestbits2012). Events can also have briefing papers (ahead of the event) and reports (after the event) uploaded that will be associated with them.  These are all treated in a similar way.

These features have already been developed, but they broke when I upgraded the site and are having to be reimplemented. :-/  I will send more details when they are ready again.

The intent is that our calendar can be a resource for any other groups who can embed it on their own sites, and extract just the events that they want.  It is straightforward to embed a calendar (either by subscribing to an iCalendar feed, or by embedding the calendar as a pre-formatted page).

To embed the pre-formatted page you add this code to your website:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://bestbits.net/?ai1ec_super_widget"></script>
Followed by this:
<div class="timely-calendar"></div>

You can modify the categories or tags that are pre-selected, and the appearance of the calendar, by adding options, for example:
Posterboard view: <div class="timely-calendar" data-action="posterboard"></div>
Stream view: <div class="timely-calendar" data-action="stream"></div>
Month view: <div class="timely-calendar" data-action="month"></div>
Week view: <div class="timely-calendar" data-action="week"></div>
Day view: <div class="timely-calendar" data-action="day"></div>
Agenda view: <div class="timely-calendar" data-action="agenda"></div>
Default view as per settings: <div class="timely-calendar"></div>
Filter by event category ID: <div class="timely-calendar" data-cat_ids="1"></div>
Filter by event category IDs (separate IDs by comma): <div class="timely-calendar" data-cat_ids="1,2"></div>
Filter by event tag ID: <div class="timely-calendar" data-tag_ids="1"></div>
Filter by event tag IDs (separate IDs by comma): <div class="timely-calendar" data-tag_ids="1,2"></div>
Filter by post ID: <div class="timely-calendar" data-post_ids="1"></div>
Filter by post IDs (separate IDs by comma): <div class="timely-calendar" data-post_ids="1,2"></div>
Hide title and navigation buttons: <div class="timely-calendar" data-no_navigation="true"></div>
Set a default start date: * <div class="timely-calendar" data-exact_date="21-12-2012"></div>
To embed using an iCalendar feed is even simpler: just adjust the options of the event calendar at http://bestbits.net/events/ how you want them, and click "Subscribe to filtered calendar" at the bottom of the page.

So as you can see, it does a lot already and more is on the way.  Hope some of this may be useful for your aims for the GovLab site too.

-- 
Dr Jeremy Malcolm
Senior Policy Officer
Consumers International | the global campaigning voice for consumers
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