Events Calendar
Owen Ambur
Shea, as you know, I believe the town should support a data
standard for events so that organizations can post the necessary
information on their own websites (or any other site they choose
to use) for ingestion into any and all sites gathering and
presenting such information for communities of all kinds (based
not only upon geography but also topical interests).
However, short of that, the town could point to proprietary
services like Eventbright, which already has a section for HHI:
https://www.eventbrite.com/d/sc--hilton-head-island/events--next-week/
Here's a site comparing Eventbrite to 12 of their competitors: https://doublethedonation.com/tips/blog/2017/08/top-eventbrite-competitors/
This site claims to identify six of their strongest competitors: https://blog.capterra.com/eventbrite-alternatives/
Those services are about more than just publishing event
information for a community calendar. However, there are more
focused services just for that purpose, like these:
https://www.calendarwiz.com/customers/community-chambers/
Perhaps these might be good strategies/objectives to include under our WG's fourth goal:
Explore with online service providers prospects for implementing a community calendar based upon an open data standard enabling the sharing of event information across other sites and services supporting the standard.
Engage the Chamber of Commerce, Island Packet, monthly magazines, Beaufort County Library System, Hilton Head Island Computer Club, and other local/regional organizations in a community of practice (CoP) to evaluate, provide usability feedback, and collaboratively implement online community calendar services.
Depending upon how well that goes, the CoP could expand its focus
to include not only event planning and scheduling functions but
also broader organization and event management functions, e.g.,
registration and dues payments, membership recruitment and
retention, etc.
For example, the HHP Yacht Club uses ConstantContact for meeting notices and registration payments. While Constant Contact provides good user support and is not very difficult to use, there is a bit of a learning curve and, at least, it would be good to explore prospects for facilitating the formation of vendor-specific users groups for some, if not all of the organizations who are already using such services (or may wish to start) -- to share experience, take fuller advantage of capabilities of the tools, and provide feedback to the vendors.
Perhaps the Computer Club might be persuaded to broaden their focus to include support for such vendor/tool-focused user groups. They do have a calendar but it may not be well-suited for a broader community, potentially with many events on each day: https://hhicc.org/calendar-events
Finally, a key point to keep in mind is that vendors will be
happy to keep selling proprietary data stovepipe systems as long
as customers are willing to continuing buying them (and locking
themselves into doing business with the vendor because the cost of
switching the data to a better service provider is too high). It
would be good if the town could work with vendors who are more
enlightened, public spirited, and committed to supporting open,
machine-readable data standards.
Unless communities begin to do so, they can never become "Truly
Connected".
Owen