New Year, New Tool to Empower the Haiku Community
In a nutshell, this is what we have added to the website:
- List of Conferences
- Map of Conferences
- Calendar of Conferences
- A Submit Conference form that the community can use to have their events be added to the above list/map/calendar.
For those organizing Haiku-related events or a Haiku presence at established conferences or trade shows, this allows them to give their effort exposure to a much wider audience (we have more than 1,500 registered users on the website!), increasing their chances of finding peers who can join them in their initiative. Furthermore, since each event entry is comment-enabled, this feature can also be used to obtain feedback and/or openly communicate and coordinate efforts among team members; it also possible to subscribe to any given event in order to receive email notifications when comment is added. You can also use the “email this page” feature (link at the bottom of the page) to let others know about the event.
On the other hand, this feature can also help those interested in learning more about Haiku or in actually becoming more engaged with the community. Specifically, the conference list, map and calendar pages may help people find a place where to gather with other community members in person near where they live. Even with all the online communication means that we have today, nothing beats good old face-to-face time to develop a sense of community or a personal relationship.
This tool has a lot of room for expansion, and as the project and community continue to grow, we can envision a system where each event can have it's own home page, forum, email notification and registration means. While we are starting with this somewhat simple (humble) addition to the website, we do have our eyes in something more ambitious for the future. As with any new system, this new feature of our website is bound to have bugs. Let us know if you find any glitches, or if you have any general feedback that may help improve the use of this tool.
Finally, we would like to emphasize that, as with everything else in an open source project, the degree to which this sort of tool becomes useful heavily depends on how much and how effectively it is used. We are making the tool available to empower the community: now it is up to all of you to make it work, for both you and for the Haiku community at large. If you have been itching to organize a local Haiku event or to represent Haiku at a conference, don't want anymore, and use this new tool to your advantage.