The Situation There are a wide variety of existing calendars in the region which function very well as individual calendars. They range from web based custom calendars through commercial ($) calendars and Yahoo or Google to downloadable spreadsheet or pdf files. Many organizations such as the Cultural Center, Chamber of Commerce, Mesa Verde Country, Dolores School District, already have beautiful and very functional online calendars on their websites. Other organizations such as Montezuma County (general calendar, Commissioners, Planning Commission, Extension Service and Fairgrounds calendars) use commercial calendars such as Trumba on their websites. These calendars provide great information to those with a focused interest in that organization. Broaden your interests to half a dozen core organizations and another half dozen casual interests and the situation changes. Put yourself in the shoes of tourists, potential residents, visitors of all kinds, new residents, etc, and the situation changes again. The bottom line is that anyone searching for events in the region for conflict avoidance, vacation planning or general information must work long and hard to see even one organization at a time. You might think that a central "clearinghouse" list of calendar links would do the job, but even using that list as a starting point, the problem described in the above paragraph still exists. First you (a tourist? potential resident? anyone) have to find that list, then you have to laboriously examine each calendar month by month one at a time (no composite view). What we need is a "regional calendar" which shows up in searches for regional placenames and activities. We need a calendar tool which allows simultaneous examination of any or all the regional calendars returned by a simple one-time search. |