Civic Calendaring

From New Orleans Wiki

1 Overview
2 Think New Orleans Calendar
- 2.1 Creating a New Civic Calendar
- 2.2 Adding an Event
3 Inbox

[edit] Overview

Almost all calendar software now imports and exports the "microformat" iCalendar. iCalendar is a file format for, you guessed it, calendars. Most calendar software will show the different imported calendars with different colors.

With a workshop, we can show a community leader how to organize their own schedule with Google Calendar. Once the calendar for their civic group is in Google Calendar, other community leaders that use Google Calendar will be able to see their events. If there are conflicts they will be able to reschedule, or perhaps, combine efforts.

They can also publish a calendar of events for the organizations they manage in the Think New Orleans Calendar. The calendars from the different civic organizations are drawn into the Think New Orleans Calendar, where anyone can see their upcoming events.

The Think New Orleans calendar can be deployed on any of the web sites developed by Think New Orleans. It is not one calendar to rule them all. Each of commnity group has a calendar that it's members can trust.

Giving each organization their own calendar, and giving community leaders a calendar as a system for time management, are both methods to move calendaring forward, faster. Rather than trying to create one super all-knowing calendar, it reflects the priorities and collborations of a particular neighborhood organization.

Why burden a user with a cumbersome query interface, when they can simply check the calendar maintained by their community organizaiton?

[edit] Think New Orleans Calendar

Google Calendar allows you to track multiple calendars on the same calendar display. You could have a work calendar and a home calendar, for example. In order to include informaiton from your civic group in the Think New Orleans Civic Calendar, you create a calend

[edit] Creating a New Civic Calendar

Create a Google account.
Login to the Google account.
Go to http://www.google.com/calendar.
In the left sidebar, you will see a section called "Calendars". Click the plus symbol next to the word "Calendars" to create a new calendar. A "Create New Calendar" form will appear.
Add a name for the calendar in the "Calendar Name" field.
Add a description for the calendar in "Description" field.
Set a location for the calendar in the "Location" field. Use a wide location, like "New Orleans, LA", or "Metairie, LA".
Under the "Share with everyone", choose "Share all information on this calendar with everyone", you will be asked to confirm that you with the calendar to be public, so click "Yes".
Click "Create Calendar", you will be asked to confirm that you wish the calendar to be public, so click "Yes".
Send an email message to alan@thinknola.com with the name of the new calendar and your google login name. I will add your calendar to the Think New Orleans calendar.

[edit] Adding an Event

View the calendar as day, week, etc.
Navigate to the day of the event.
Click on the time of the event, a call out appears.
Type the name of the event.
Choose the calendar for the event, in this case the calendar of your civic group.
Click "Create event".
Click on the newly created event to futher edit the event details, an event edit form will appear.
Click on the date next to "When", edit boxes to adjust the time of the meeting will appear.
Click on "Click to add a location" and type the full address of the location of the meeting.
Click on "Click to add a description" and type a description of the meeting. You can add HTML hyperlinks to the text if you know how.
Click "Save" to save the calendar.