Organising courses and Events?
We regularly receive requests from members of our network to spread announcements of courses, workshops and other events. Obviously that is an important function that the network can perform.
We have a website that enables us to bring news to the attention of a huge audience. It's a great tool, provided we use it properly. One of the advantages over printed media is that we can use the computers that make up a big part of the system to help us in gathering, processing and republishing the information about events. There's even a name for that: syndication or in computer-speak: RSS (Really Simple Syndication).
Recently a special version of RSS was developed:
ESS or Event Standard Syndication. As you can guess from this name: it's specifically for spreading information about events.
The idea is that the organiser of an event publishes all the information about their event on their own website and then ESS takes care of spreading that information to other websites -
automatically. This also means that the organiser is in full control of what information is spread and when. It enables automatic updates, when things change, like a change in date or venue or speakers.
It makes the information automatically complete, correct and timely. And is saves a lot of work and effort for everybody, while exposing the announcements to the largest possible audience. Everybody wins!
Now, this system is relatively new and it's not in use much, but that could change quickly and decisively when a couple of coders pick up our challenge.
Calling all Coders!
We'd like to invite coders in our European permaculture community to help with this project. We want to build on the ESS standard and make it easy for all organisations in our network to publish events on their own websites using ESS. We can then configure our website to automatically check the list of those websites for events and compile a comprehensive and accurate calendar of European courses, workshops and other events. This can then serve to generate traffic to the websites of our members and expose a wide audience (of millions of people in Europe) to their wonderful events.
The
ESS website provides detailed information for coders to work with. There is an example application for Wordpress. So we don't start from scratch.
Please send us an
comms [at] permaculture-network [dot] eu (email) if you are interested and able to help us this summer.
Warm regards from your EuPN Communications & Image Team