Moxie:

 Yes, We are looking for this option too! We would like to offer members the option of posting their own events. Also, is there a future option for those registered for the events to view who else is registered and leave a message? THANKS!

 

kwmarketing:

I would like to suggest a feature that allows members to submit events to the calendar for approval by an admin.

We would be extremely interested in this as well.

 

This would be wonderful, especially if there was a separate calendar the member would be able to view with just member events with basic details.

Checking in on your timeline. Any updates on when this might be available? I echo everything Giuliano Valentino had to say about how it might work. thanks,

This is now in design stage. Best case - it will be included in version 3.4 which goes into development in early December and should be out in mid-late feb 2010. If it does not make it into 3.4, it will likely go into 3.5, so add two more months.

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

Fantastic! Thanks for working on this! We will love it!

When we signed up I spoke to your customer service who said that the option for the public to submit events was coming soon.  I have been searching around here and don't see that.   We would love to have the option for the public to submit events.  Of course people would have to sign up to do this which I guess makes them a member so is that was this upgrade is?  What we are envisioning is adding an ADD your EVENT button on the home page and it prompts you to register or log in to do so.  Is that what this upgrade will offer?

 Thanks for all your hard work!

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Dani
http://www.bosshi.com

Dani:

We do have a solution that we've analyzed. Essentially a member would be able to submit some a title, description and date(s) for an event. The admin would them review this and then make it visible, or have a setting where it is automatically published. The admin can also further edit it as they desire - as they would for any other event.

Right now it is in our development queue, which may lead to some further refinement. Once we have a developer and release assigned to it, we will let you know.

As well, we do see that there is a lot of interest for this. I have made of note of this, and it will be used to help prioritize the issue.

Since this may not make it into the next couple of version releases, we are moving this to the wishlist for the time being.

Thanks for your response.  I think I might have asked that question wrong.  What I would like to see is that there is an option for the public (non members) to submit events and comment on forums.  As a Chamber of Commerce, we wanted the Chamber site to be a place where the community and businesses could post events and chat about things to do and community issues, since we are a major tourist town in Hawaii.  Many come to our site to see what is going on not only in our town but island wide.  There are many event sites out there but as a Chamber I think it is expected that we have and offer the capability of adding events and letting the public ask questions of our members who are all business owners in our community .  The problem as I see it on your side and our side is that if they have to sign up to do so they are added to the database and then it grows meaning more cost to us.  There would have to be some other area they could sign up on like just to have access to the forum (which is another wish I have, that the public can sign up and post questions to our forum without having to be in the membership database).  I know it would be easier to allow the public to manage public events themselves and we just manage our chamber events.  Is this something that is being considered?  Regarding the forum, is there a way I am not seeing that people are using the existing system to allow the public to use the forum?  I was thinking of making an option in our membership list that is FRIENDS OF THE CHAMBER and it would  be free.  Then they can post to the forum.  However, we don't want our database growing too much, I suppose I could  limit the membership and make people reapply every year.  I also don't know if I can prevent these people from creating profiles and having them show in our directory since we only want our paying members in the directory.  I have tried to look for examples of this on this forum but I am not seeing where someone has resolved this yet.

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Dani
http://www.bosshi.com

Appreciate the detailed comment - this provides much better perspective on what you are looking for.

We will consider this - though for now I am still cautious about allowing non-members to post events. You can very quickly end up with a lot of spam on your public calendar, some of it could be quite offensive. So for now we are still focusing on giving the event posting ability to members for starters.

 Re forum - similar issue here. Public can post comments but can not create new threads. I think creating a free level  like "friends of chamber" makes sense. You can make it renew every year and have system auto-archive records which did not renew.

It should not be a problem regarding directory - you can specify which levels should be included there. 

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

We have been analyzing this issue for a while and think that we have a solution that meets the needs of most people who want to use this feature.

I'm going to be posting the feature description that we plan to present to our developers. Before we do, we'd like to get your feedback on it. Is this something that would benefit you? Are there any details we missed. Also, is there anything in the story that you wouldn't use?

Thanks!

Configuration

There will be a new setting page: Settings -> Events -> Member submitted events

• Admin enables a setting Allow members to submit events
• Admin can also decide whether he wants to manually approve submitted events or have them published immediately when they are submitted/ (Does this by enabling by a setting)
  

Submitting an event

• When enabled, any public event list page page has a link on it - Submit an event
• Clicking on the link brings up a form where the member enters
  
  • Name of event (required)
  • Description
  • Location (required)
  • Start date and time (date required)
  • End date and time

• When member submits their event
• Event is created - Visibility according to setting
• Tagged as member_submitted by the system
• Initiating member identity stored along with event
  

Event registration

•  Member cannot enable registrations for submitted events. Only the admin can do that.

Approval of member-submitted events

• This happens if the Admin set it up so that event are NOT published as soon as they are submitted.
  
• An email is sent to the member (BCC to admin) informing them that an event has been submitted
• (ideally) An email is sent to the member when the event it made visible. (Only for the first time - so if admin makes it hidden and visible again, no second email is sent.)
• if there is an approval process, admin just makes the event Visible. Using visibility flag we keep it very simple and rely on standard functionality
• So there is no difference between admin-created and member-submitted events - they use the same current functionality and rules (re visibility, registration)
  

Immediate display of submitted events

• An email is sent to the member (BCC to admin) informing them that an event has been submitted and published

Admin event list

• Both admin admin and member events are shown in the list
• Member-submitted events are visually differentiated from other events.
  
• Add "submitted by data" into the list - so keyword search can be used by name of the person submitting the event

Public event details

• Display initiating contact name (as link) on event details so other user can click and view his profile
• Hide the event if profile is not available for public view

We would like to enable selected membership levels to add their own events to our events calendar.

We would anticipate that some of the features of the events admin page would not be available - such as enabling registration, payments, listing registrants options etc.

 

 

This is pretty much exactly what we need!!  Any sense of a timeline for release yet? 

It's still on our wishlist meaning it has not been placed on the roadmap yet so no timeline yet but unfortunately most likely at least a year away. 

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

I like your idea! Excellent! I would love to see that "Calendar entry" feature.

I hope that this soon moves from the wish-list to the road-map. This functionality is greatly needed by many of our clients. At present our workaround is to use a form for the "public" to submit an event. The client then approves the event and enters the information into their events calendar with tags as a "public" event. The proposed process would streamline things greatly.

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Kenn Penn
President/CEO
ChamberSolutions
Association Benefits Alliance
4-Members

Throwing my vote into the hat. My organization is focused on triathlons and members are the main driver of training events. One of the primary functions of the organization's website is to allow members to post and manage their own events. They don't need approval though we do keep an eye out for abuse.

Because this capability is so critical to our organization's functioning, not having it is a show-stopper.

@rapdup

Thanks for pitching in. Current thread is only discussing how members can submit events - but NOT manage them afterwards.  

If you need that, please create a new thread and give us an example of what kind of capabilities you are looking for.  

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

This is somethig we are waiting for as well.  I hope this gets into the next release as it is an important function of what we do.....

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Michael McConnell

Michael - and everyone - I would appreciate additional insight into broader context:

What is driving the need for you to have members submit events - what are the common situations where you have this, how is this currently handled, how frequent/important this is etc.  

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

Our members are playwrights, directors, dramaturgs- theater people.  We currently have events posted that are all over the country, and we have over 1000 members.  As the calendar gains in popularuty, we would love to not do all the data entry for these events.  Because the calendar is publicly viewable, and only members can post events, this is a big member benefit to them to promote their event.  This is how I'd like to see this function:

Members enter events with specific required data  (customizable by organization maybe?).

Admin gets an email to approve or reject event

Event gets posted or email goes back to user with explanation of why.  This would be automated, and admin could type reason for rejection into email text.

Same member can edit his or her event and then ask for approval again.  Members can only edit events that they posted themselves.

Calendar is searchable by zip code proximity (search within 5,10, 15 miles...) or by city, host name (or theater company in our case).

 Events without payment might be allowed to have registration functions, but that is not very necessary for us.

 

Thanks!

Anna Peterson
Membership Manager & Literary Associate
The Playwrights' Center
Visit http://www.pwcenter.org.

 

 

We currenty use calendars for two general types of events.

1.Events hosted by us (Digital Nova Scotia) where we use the full capacity of the events module for registration and ticket purchasing.

2.Events hosted by others where we are simply using the calendar as a list of events which may be of interest to our members or are actually hosted by the members themselves. No registration or ecommerce is used in this type of event

In our particular case we would only allow members to post events in case 2. We would also require that events posted by members be approved by an admin. This could be as simple as not allowing the member to make it visible. The admin could be notified when a new event is posted by a member and then the admin could choose to make it visible or delete it.

We should be able to select which membeship levels are allowed to post events to a particular calendar.

Michael 

 

 

 

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Michael McConnell

@wmorrison - interesting point. So the question is: Are we talking about

1) External events that somebody else is putting up and members are recommending to other members

vs.

2) Event suggestions - events that members suggest your organization should put up.

My current thinking for now is focused on 1). Also, for practical purposes, solving 2) requires a whole another layer of collaboration. 

I would appreciate input from other readers.  

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

Anna,

Thanks for your post, sorry it took me some time to get to this.

So far our thinking is that once event is posted, member cannot edit it - all further management/coordination would have to be done by administrators. (Otherwise, we are talking about members getting involved in a pretty complex event management process etc.)

Do you think this is a reasonable first step? Do you frequently have events which should be edited/managed by submitting members?

(The search by zip code proximity is a separate issue - we currently have nothing of sorts, you might want to start a new thread) 

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot