Add a calender for community events

Develop a calendar for the community, one that is easy to add to and easy to susbcribe to and access.

Founder of Digital Media Design Studio (10+ yrs experience as a coder)

Media Design & CompSci

Experienced Web Developer (ruby, rails, js)

Design and code an easy-to-use catalyst community events site that will..

1. Make it really easy for visitors to see what events are upcoming.
2. Make it easy for people to add their events and related event details
3. Make it easy to filter and seek events of a type (eg beginner friendly) or topic.
4. Have a .ics calendar that people can easily subscribe to into their calendar.
5. Make it easier to see what's on in the context of your own local timezone.

Why are we wanting to create this project?

For some time now I've had friends encourage me to get involved in the Cardano Catalyst Community. Personally it's been difficult to know what's on and when and I want to make that easier for everyone brining my design and coding skills to the task.

Finally, my son is now in second year Computer Science and I saw this project as a good opportunity for us to work together since we're both doing coding work and we've been wanting to collaborate on a project.

How will this project contribute directly to the F7: Community Events Campaign Goals

How can we increase meaningful participation in Project Catalyst among all stakeholders? How can active participation in events be increased? How can the number of participants in events be increased?

Our goal is to create a hub of all upcoming events for the catalyst community that encourages people to attend more events, host events of their own and generally have more people going along to events and easily getting involved. We sense that making it easier for people to discover upcoming events is a key to increasing active participation in the community.

How can we increase voter-proposer interaction?

An events hub can make it easier for proposers and voters to meet as any events that are planned are more discoverable to voters and proposers alike.

How can we onboard and integrate new people into Project Catalyst?

Pointing new users to our events hub will show them that there is a thriving community around the project and provide easy opportunities for them to attend beginner friendly events as well as other events that fill well with their interests. Online meetups and hosted events are usually a great opportunity to meet other community members and for people to get inspired and start getting practically involved.

New member onboarding help guides can suggest new community members seek out and attend certain beginner friendly events. A calendar hub with tags for things like #beginner-friendly and #getting-starter can connect new members up with shortly upcoming events that align with where they are at when they arrive, making for a much more seamless introduction to the community, especially one as distributed as we are.

How can events help keep the community together? How can we use events to build new teams?

A central events hub makes getting attendees along to your unique events much easier, with a ready audience someone can spin up a gathering events, co-design events, team creation events and more.

How we will work?

We will seek to draw on other open source community calendars to leverage effective work completed by others. We will use open source tools and approaches and we will develop on an open source repository and encourage community feedback, engagement and contributions.

Once we have an early alpha version live, we'll dog food our own tool to host 2-3 community consultation events which will be listed on the platform and used as a way to also draw attention to the platform. One of these sessions will be focussed on how the community can leverage this tool to get more people to attend their own events.

If we are successful in this round and we sense good community support for this project, we'll also consider applying again for a later round for a version 2.0 of the calendar enabling expansion to include more of the communities most desirable features, that are discovered during this 'get an early working version live' version of the tool.

We will also use this as an opportunity to contribute to the open sources projects we build upon, we are big fans of open source and it's important that projects like this also contribute improvements back upstream to support those upon which our success stands. Part of the work may involve taking an existing open source calendar project that needs some love and helping extend it and bring it up-to-date for the needs here, but we'll see as we go as to which way is going to be most effective. We definitley have already explored a few ways to go about this but the co-design workshops will help us narrow in on key features beyond what we've outlined here.

Milestones

January 2022

Community CoDesign Workshop (better understand the need and use cases)

Initial Design Work

Alpha Release Live with bare basic features (add events, see events)

February 2022

Second Community Workshop

Beta release to include Event Filtering and calendar subscribing resolved

Refine Design

March 2022

Launch of new calendar

Support community to add events

Public online training event to introduce people to the tool

Blog post launching the event

Completion of simple guide for using the tool

Expected Public Launch Date: 31 March 2022

Budget

My team is close and used to working together on digital products.

The workshops will be open invitation and help inform the project development.

Lead Dev $120 x 20hrs = $2400

Dev $80 x 20hrs = $1600

Designer $60 x 20hrs = $1200

CoDesign Workshops $80 x 5hrs = $400

Writing a good guide $50 x 6 hrs = $300

Infrastructure & Project Costs = $1000

Total = $6900

Metrics

Key goal is to Increase active participation in community events

Measured through:

1. Number of Community events listed
2. Number of Event Hosts (people who have listed an event)
3. Monthly Unique visitors to the Events Calendar site
4. Monthly Unique Visitors to the Calendar Subscription page

Definition of Success

After 3 months

The site is live and over 6 events are being added a month to the site.

Monthly visitors rises month on month as does number of registered event hosts.

After 6 months

Over a dozen events are being added a month. New types of events are being added and run on the basis that there is a clear place to go to attract the catalyst community as an audience for upcoming events.

After 12 months

The site is clearly known as a great place to go to find out about upcoming catalyst community events and the community activley adds events here as the primary list of events.