As a brain child the National Capital Region Pagan Leadership Conference, the OHF has been working on launching a regional Pagan community events calendar for DC, Maryland, and Virginia. The purpose of building such a calendar is to build community through connecting people to groups and experiences. We've been exploring various options, and settled with upkeeping a complex Google calendar.
- The calendar is divided into five sections. First, we list OHF events. Then, DC events, followed by Virginia, and then Maryland events. The last list is of other events that do not occur in DC, MD, or VA, but might be of interest.
- The last list of events also includes the phases of the Moon and US holidays for reference.
- This set of embedded calendars allows folks to select which individual calendars they would like to view from the various groups in the area.
- Included are live ical feeds from all of the area's meetup groups as well.
- Where a group has used an online calendar, such as Google calendar, we are able to pull a live feed from their calendar.
This project is only beginning. Events can be updated or submitted to the calendar, and the intent is to include as many events of Pagan and related paths/modalities as possible. We do recognize that we might miss events as they come across the lists, and if someone notices we have missed something, we would appreciate that they submit those events to the calendar via the event submission form. This is meant to be an all-inclusive list of events, so please make sure to flag us, even if you're not the organizer of an event.
Another purpose of this calendar is also to help group leaders better plan events by seeing what is already scheduled. We encourage event and festival organizers to submit their event dates to us as soon as they have confirmed them, so that we can mark them on this community calendar. This most especially to alert other organizers what you are planning in order to avoid scheduling multiple large events on the same dates. This is unavoidable at times, as we all generally follow similar cycles, but for the cross-scheduling that organizers want to avoid, this calendar also serves as a mechanism to reduce unwanted double-booking.
This calendar has been in the works since early 2010, and we are continuing to explore better options to host the community calendar for the future.
|
