Maptime "Upcoming Events" Page

[mapsam]

As discussed on Slack, we're looking to find a solution for showing all upcoming maptime meetings. This is rather difficult currently because of the current nature of how Maptime chapters announce their events. A good portion are on meetup.com, but this is by no means required – the rest either being on personal websites or via twitter and others that I'm likely unaware of.

In order to do this effectively, events will need to be located in one location. Proposed solutions are as follows:

1. Using a google form to submit an upcoming maptime event for your local chapter. This form populates a spreadsheet, which can be queried via tabletop.js and showcased into a page on the website. A prototype has been put together by MaptimeSEA on their repo, called maptimetime. user friendly, maintainable
2. Use @csterling's database and query it. This would be nice for speed, but difficult for updating. I'm lacking in knowledge about this potential option. fast, reliable
3. Add upcoming meetings to the chapters.geojson file, which would require significant upkeep by branch organizers. concise, organized(?)
4. Manually on a page, old school style!
5. fork calagator and make a maptime events board. labor intensive, stalwart

Let's see what we can do!

[jonahadkins]

#1 Seems Good - We're already using Google Forms for post-meet surveys, etc.

[lyzidiamond]

I <3 tabletop! I also vote for the first option. 🐧 🇺🇸 ✳️

[mapsam]

Cool - sounds like we can make a quick survey to append to the potential onboarding page - just need to determine what information to collect!

Here's the current test form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1OfA8sV0Vs0-WlCwRBALC8p_RR1zMFS-WXYtXnyDzTA0/viewform

ps: sorry for not putting this in /maptime/maptime repo ... didn't know it existed!

[geografa]

I really am liking Typeform but haven't had the chance to set anything up. https://typeform.com/. It's 10 bucks a month to collect responses which doesn't seem bad for the ease of making forms and collecting user data. See the events and surveys examples.

[mapsam]

@geografa does typeform do anything that the google form doesn't? Looks like they have an API at least. http://helpcenter.typeform.com/hc/en-us/articles/200071986-Data-API

I've updated the prototype with some new date functionality. Would be interesting to build some sort functions to view only a specific chapter.

[lyzidiamond]

Might not be super helpful, but check out the cfapi: http://github.com/codeforamerica/cfapi

[mapsam]

Ohhh interesting - would adding these events in CfA be a problem administratively?

[mapsam]

OH wait jk are you talking about forking it?

[lyzidiamond]

@svmatthews yes, forking 😜 🍼 🔌

[mapsam]

🍴 🍔 🙊

[mapsam]

So, how would we like to showcase this information visually? A list of upcoming events or in a calendar format?

[jonahadkins]

[mapsam]

Right on - so is this something we want ot load on every page? Could be a drag on page speed because of tabletop.js calling the spreadsheet. Maybe we can at least build in a loading.gif for safe measure.

[geografa]

What about upcoming ones only show if they're within the next two weeks and then all others list on the chapters page?

[jonahadkins]

👍

[rhewitt22]

Loading ~5-10 upcoming meetings for the sidebar would be nice, althought I think it would have the same drag on page speed as loading everything since calling the spreadsheet is likely to be the bottleneck as opposed to loading the data.

Design with modularity in mind and we could easily port this sidebar "widget" to chapter pages so folks don't have to scroll around to find their meeting.

I would support listing all meetings either on the chapter page, or on a dedicated schedule/meeting page.

[mapsam]

Yah, the bottleneck will be the call to the spreadsheet rather than the listing of the data on the page - since tabletop will grab the whole document. My first impression was that we would put this on a dedicated /events page (url TBD), but love the idea of it being on the sidebar.

Making it modular is totally the idea - would be nice to even build a filter option so you could see a specific chapter's events. I'll do a few tests in the next couple days and this weekend to see if we can ensure the page load isn't affected by the data call, and we'll just have a loading gif - I suspect it won't be absurdly long, especially if we keep the spreadsheet clean of outdated events.

[rhewitt22]

My experience embedding full Google sheets into a page with an iFrame only took a second or two. I suspect calling the API would be faster, and since it's not the page's main content a spinny loading gif will definitely suffice.

[mapsam]

loading.gif it is! We shouldn't need an iframe since tabletop.js is essentially our call to the API.

My ToDo list:

• prototype a sidebar ~2 weeks of events
• prototype a full /events page with all upcoming events & chapter filter option
• finalize form and spreadsheet (including google drive locations)
• make modular and reusable for other chapters and the world.

[lyzidiamond]

@svmatthews's to-do list in checkbox form:

• prototype a sidebar ~2 weeks of events
• prototype a full /events page with all upcoming events & chapter filter option
• make modular and reusable for other chapters and the world.

🌊 🍔 🚜

[mapsam]

OH I always forget about those!

✔️ ✅ 🏁

[mapsam]

Important information to gather from the form and show on website:

• Chapter
• Title (?)
• Date / time
• Location (?)
• Link / URL to event listing

Is this all we need? Suggestions welcomed!

[danswick]

• contact?

[jonahadkins]

💯 %

[rhewitt22]

Optional URL for workshop materials? Could be a nice way for people to find a link to the presentation/github repo before, during, after the event.

[mapsam]

If we have a link for the "event posting" that will likely exist on meetup.com or other sites - would that be sufficient? Don't want to overcomplicate things especially since a lot of this information may become redundant if chapter leaders have to submit this information in multiple places.

[mapsam]

@danswick I bet we could link to the contact info on the current /chapters page if we build proper anchor tags? Would be one less field to enter at least!

[mapsam]

Here's the form prototype - https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1OfA8sV0Vs0-WlCwRBALC8p_RR1zMFS-WXYtXnyDzTA0/viewform

[rhewitt22]

@svmatthews did you start a branch for an events page/ sidebar widget? I'm going to be on vacation starting Thursday wouldn't mind sprinting on this to knock it out.

[mapsam]

Yah I had set up the events branch a while ago with some working styles and the tabletop.js portion working properly. Just dropped the ball on finalizing and merging. You should take a look and let me know if you have any questions! That repo is going to be way behind the master at this point, so I'd pull and fix any conflicts first.

I'm in my last week of the job and heading to Minnesota on Saturday evening for the holidays. Will be back on board after and ready to rock!

[rhewitt22]

@svmatthews I'm heading home to Maryland for the holidays so I'll need a few projects to tinker with. Happy to help out!

[rhewitt22]

@svmatthews bump.

Can you share the form/spreadsheet of responses so I can work on this?

royhewitt07 at gmail dot com

[mapsam]

Shared the form & spreadsheet