Austin Improv

I was talking with some people about this today. We need a master calendar for the entirety of the austin improv collective. It would have to be:

-Free to edit by Austin Improv Collective Members
-Quite large
-A linkable site to show non Austin Improv Collective people (I'm thinking a sort of editable calendar which turns into a large zoomable PDF
-One site...or one page for each month?

This way we can all know what all know if, say, July 9th, 2 things are going on at one theatre, 3 things at another, 1 thing at another, and the 4 classes/workshops which may or may not occur on that day.

As this is the Austin Improv COLLECTIVE, anyone can edit it into there, so it won't need to be a burden on one person. But hopefully, if a show is going up on a day, one person in the troupe would want to publicize that on the calendar. If not... ok then.

Of course, I don't know enough about programing. Especially in the extents of this site, so I don't know exactly what could be done or if it's possible, but it would be really nice to have and very helpful.

I would love something like this. I used to maintain a weekly list of all the shows happening in Austin on the front page of austinimprov.com, but there got to be too many shows, and I got busier.

The only way it could hope to survive/be up to date at all is if it was super simple and super easy to edit.

I suggest using Google Calendar. It should be able to do everything you mentioned besides turning into a pdf (the calendar can be embedded into webpages, however). Requires a Google account for anyone who wants to edit it though.

I tried to do this a few years ago, but in a very very specific way for the Austin Improv site. If it's just a simple matter of data collection, it should be very doable assuming everyone uses Google Calendar for their events data.

Roy Janik wrote:I would love something like this. I used to maintain a weekly list of all the shows happening in Austin on the front page of austinimprov.com, but there got to be too many shows, and I got busier.

The only way it could hope to survive/be up to date at all is if it was super simple and super easy to edit.

Word. About two years ago, Asaf, Jon Bolden and I all tried to figure out a way to automatically aggregate show data from the various theater websites for a master calendar, but it proved to be far too difficult at that time. We couldn't get a feed going for some of the theaters, and without that, it becomes a much riskier proposition.

I'm not sure if I'm a fan of crowd sourcing the calendar. All it takes is one bad apple to spoil the bunch if everyone gets the same level of access. If we do varying levels of access, we become very dependent on those people at the top to be reliable and take care of things early and often. Show substitutions happen often, as well.

One potential strategy might be to get interns from the various theaters to create individual Google calendar (or at least exporting the previous calendar) feeds for each theater. It should be possible to aggregate the individual GCal feeds, and the responsibility for updating them would be placed on the individual theaters. It's a marketing opportunity that the theaters could choose to participate in. Of course, then you get into an issue of how you display the calendar and ensure that the same theaters don't always get top billing each night.

Jon Bolden wrote:I tried to do this a few years ago, but in a very very specific way for the Austin Improv site. If it's just a simple matter of data collection, it should be very doable assuming everyone uses Google Calendar for their events data.

Woo, great minds.

I love the idea, but honestly most of the individual theater administrators will likely be too busy to update a second calendar. Then you're dealing with volunteer labor and then it becomes dicey

Jastroch wrote:I love the idea, but honestly most of the individual theater administrators will likely be too busy to update a second calendar. Then you're dealing with volunteer labor and then it becomes dicey

That's why the idea of an aggregator that takes the work you've already done on your own calendar and automatically updates the central calendar becomes more attractive.

What does ColdTowne use for calendaring? I see that the Hideout uses a WordPress plugin, which means there's probably a way to get the calendar events out as an RSS feed. As for the other theaters, I have no idea.

Brad Hawkins wrote: That's why the idea of an aggregator that takes the work you've already done on your own calendar and automatically updates the central calendar becomes more attractive.

That assumes that the work already done results in something an aggregator can readily parse.

Brad Hawkins wrote: What does ColdTowne use for calendaring? I see that the Hideout uses a WordPress plugin, which means there's probably a way to get the calendar events out as an RSS feed. As for the other theaters, I have no idea.

Neither ColdTowne nor The Hideout seem to have an easily discoverable computer friendly version of their calendar. In theory someone could write a screen scraper for each calendar site, but that way lies madness.

I love this idea, but you'd have to get everyone to use calendar software that can output iCalendar data (or some other well supported format). I'm guessing that for those sites that don't already do so that this would require a non-trivial amount of work.

Crowdsourcing the data has its issues, but it would probably be much more practical in the short term.

We're migrating over to wordpress site -- our current site was built in 2005 with no budget, so it has some short comings.

Our next calendar will have a feed, but making it accessible to the AIC wasn't really on our mind. Bolden might know more about it.

Just took a look at Google Calendar. It doesn't seem as though you can put two things in the same space of time. You can with iCalendar, but that's not online (to my knowledge) You can also set up different calendars that over lap on iCalendar which can be color coded. and can be checked off and on to bring up or ignore if you want to clear up the space temporarily.

Edit: Wait actually you can with google calendar, they just get super scrunched up, but you can pull down the description tab and see the whole thing when you want. Should work out pretty well. Especially considering that the theatres decide the schedules 2-3 months in advance.

Crowd sourcing or nothing at all. Assigning gatekeepers is no good.

Spots wrote:Crowd sourcing or nothing at all. Assigning gatekeepers is no good.

There would have to be some sort of gatekeeping, to reduce the instances of malicious edits (this may not happen very often) and entries that are not improv shows (you better believe this will happen, and often -- anytime content is editable by the public, it's editable by spammers).

MitchellD wrote:Just took a look at Google Calendar. It doesn't seem as though you can put two things in the same space of time. You can with iCalendar, but that's not online (to my knowledge) You can also set up different calendars that over lap on iCalendar which can be color coded. and can be checked off and on to bring up or ignore if you want to clear up the space temporarily.

Edit: Wait actually you can with google calendar, they just get super scrunched up, but you can pull down the description tab and see the whole thing when you want. Should work out pretty well. Especially considering that the theatres decide the schedules 2-3 months in advance.

Don't pay attention to how you see things on calendar.google.com, it's possible to use those feeds and incorporate them into a new, easier-to-read design. One of the issues would be making sure that the data could be pulled in a relatively uniform fashion.

Another issue is the copy itself. While a show description of "The funniest damned improv show in Austin" might be fine (if a little tacky) for use on a theater's website, once it's aggregated into a more generic city-wide show listing, it's a little weird. When I did the general weekly listings, I often had to subtly edit the descriptions, and change stuff like "Our newest house troupe" to "ColdTowne's newest house troupe". Not a HUGE dealbreaker, but something to keep in mind.