Why is office hours on the events page? What does it need? #1006
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The simple answer to the question of why office hours is on the events page, is probably the question of visibility. I think, we're trying to recreate a kind of Backdrop CMS calendar, under the assumption (based upon feedback) that very few people really uses the Google Calendar the way it is currently structured. We were looking for a way to promote office hours such that someone can come to the site and see that there are office hours on a specific date. I believe this gives people more confidence that they are actually happening. We talked today about possibly doing work on the events.backdropcms.org site that would solve this problem. More discussion and work to follow. |
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from @irinaz in the parent issue:
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I don't think that's the complete use-case here. There are different kinds of events, and different people are looking for them in different places. We want people to learn about webinars and office hours when they are not looking for information about events. If people don't know they exist, why would they look for them?
Yes, I saw that suggestion and I also don't think it will help with either use-case. Especially getting people to know about them when they are not looking for them specifically. The events site is currently our version of Hopin. It's for registering and attending our own events. It makes sense that it's a separate site, because it has a completely different job than all the others. I'm curious to see the suggested solutions. |
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I agree that Office Hours are much more about support than events or meetings. Attempting to put myself in the shoes of those who have come looking for support, here is a stab at the requirements for Office Hours: As someone investigating Backdrop as a possibility As a new site architect trying to build my own Backdrop site As a more experienced site architect or developer but new to Backdrop I think key things to make easy to find:
I don't think they need to be in events, but they do need to be easy to find from multiple places. |
I think that people looking for information about events are also interested in community meeting topics and office hours. I also think that sometimes people do know about office hours or community meetings, but don't remember the details or the date/time. If I were coming to BackdropCMS.org looking for information about an upcoming community meeting (also being referred to as webinar) or looking for when office hours are, I would go to the events page. We might just be using the word event differently here. One might think of events as things like camps, cons, or Backdrop LIVE and think of webinars or office hours as something different. Or, one might think of events as things that happen on the calendar, which would include all of these things. Untimately, I think we need a calendar somewhere and I don't think Google Calendar is being used effectively. The reason that Office Hours are listed on the events page, is because it's the best option given the currently available tools. At the moment, I treat the events page as a place to post information about things that are happening where people (the public) can come and learn more about Backdrop CMS. I distinguish this from internal meetings, such as the dev meeting or the design/ux meeting. To me, these are something different. That is why I post Office Hours on the events page, but not the weekly dev meeting. Office Hours are specifically designed to promote Backdrop and help people learn about it. For me, the point is I want a place for people to go and look for things that they can participate in during the next week or the next month. I want a place, where someone can look if they know that something is scheduled, but they don't remember when it is. What I think we need is a community calendar and the current implementation of Google calendar has not proven useful to people. It might be that the events page wasn't intended for this kind of use, but it's the best thing that we have at the moment. I think we need something like this: https://www.drupal.org/community/events |
What needs to happen to move forward with this issue? Documented steps? |
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I believe that the steps required to move this forward is a very specific proposal that answers the following the questions.
Example: I would recommend that we do the following.
We can continue to treat Meetings differently. Meetings are inward facing and intented largely for the benefit of doing the business of the Backdrop community. The Weekly developer meeting or the UX meeting fit into this. I'm certainly open to other variations on this, but am offering this as a more specific starting proposal. Will try to open a new issue with this specific proposal. |
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@stpaultim @jenlampton @Wylbur @yorkshire-pudding , does that mean that we can add tasks in meta issue #890 or we want to open separate issues? Events display already has all information https://backdropcms.org/news/events, just needs formatting more like block in upcoming events in sidebar |
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@irinaz - I believe that this issue is being blocked by the fact that there are a few different questions that being talked about which effect one another to some degree, but dealing with all three issues at once is creating some confusion. I'm going to open three different discussions to deal with the following three issues. My sense is that this will help us move quicker to improvements. I am assuming that there is some consensus that we need to figure out a better way of managing event listings.
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This is a follow-up to #890
A thought: We do have two different google calendars. One is for events, and the other is for meetings. The reason they are separate is because they are managed differently. We did expect anyone to be able to add an event, to do things like promote their own camps or conferences they will be attending. But meetings are "official" and are only added by people who are authorized to create them.
Things like "Office hours" fall directly into this category of "meetings" - things that should not be created by just anyone. We had never planned for meetings to be part of the "events" listing on b.org. Instead, all official (recurring) meetings are documented on backdropcms.org/support/resources instead, including a link to the google calendar.
At some point we started mis-using "events" for office hours, and now it sounds like we are trying to do the same with webinars.
Let's take a step back and see what the office hours need was, and see if we can solve that in another way that also works for webinars. Maybe these things can also auto-feed into our other google calendar (or what I'd prefer, would be feed from the calendar to the website) I'll create a follow-up for that too.
@stpaultim correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think the reason we started adding "Office hours" as events was just to increase their visibility. Is that right? We wanted more people to know about them, so we wanted information about them to show up in more places where people might accidentally stumble across it -- is that right?
If so, then we also need that for Webinars, and we should find a solution that works for both of them.
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