Demosphere Project

The visible frontend of Demosphere is only a very small part of the code. The backend is much larger. It is made of several tools (including a firefox extension) that help finding and entering events.

Frontend components

You can take a look at the http://www.demosphere.eu or http://kinimatorama.net sites to get an idea of all the front-end stuff. Here are a few features you might miss:

• interactive google-map with events and time line
• public interactive form for submiting events
• highly configurable widgets. With these, users can display customized calendars on their own web-sites.
• receive events by email (logged in users can configure which events, how many events and when). A position can be chose on a map, to receive events "near my home"
• user calendars (calendars where each user can select his own events, and publish his selection)

Backend components

Tracking and entering events is a lot of work, most of the backend features are meant to make that work faster and easier.

• a (simple) mail reader for automatically finding future dates and keywords in high volume mailing-lists.
• a feed reader, that also finds future dates and keywords
• a "page watch" component that tells you when a web page has changed.
• a text matching system that helps identifying identical events (you generally receive many similar or identical copies of each event)
• a firefox extension that highlights future dates and keywords on web pages, and also helps copy/pasting from web pages.
• several ajax suggestion systems to help entering dates, addresses and emails in event forms.
• a document conversion system that helps importing PDF, word documents, images etc.
• a control panel to help manage your workflow
• a list of pending events that need attention
• an inline contextual help system

For www.demosphere.eu we spend about 2 to 3 hours every day (7 days a week), looking for events and entering them… which is a lot of work. That is why we have spent so much time developing tools to make the work-flow more efficient.

With our tools, entering (formatting) an event is fairly quick. What takes a lot of time is going through a large number of mailing lists, feeds, web sites to find events. In our experience, if we wait for users to submit events, then we miss a lot of them, or only get them at the last moment (too late). The more institutional, well organized events are generally submitted by the organizers, but the smaller, more interesting grassroots events are often forgotten or submitted too late. We also spend a lot of time keeping track of events that are not well organized (time, or location is not defined or changes). We try to find reliable sources for each event, and that also adds some work.