Brian Dear, founder of Eventful, talks to us about how structuring event data is helping people find the events that matter to them and their communities.

What does Eventful do?

Eventful's mission is to help people discover, track, create, and share events. Basically, we want to provide worldwide comprehensive service to help people find events everywhere. We're trying to address a major need that the Internet hasn't met until now, which is basically a search engine dedicated to event discovery.

We're trying to exploit technology to the fullest to help people with one particular niche, albeit a very large niche. On any given day, probably 50 million events go on throughout the world.

Social media practitioners must understand what not to do in the space, as the grassroots are extraordinarily unforgiving and interconnected. Don't be a weed. To wit, I received a message from a friend on Facebook, and immediately it struck me that he was shooting himself in the social media foot with an uzi. The message which I received was sent to 18 persons whose first name begins with the letter R. One can only assume that this instance of his message recurred many times, hence the uzi. It comes across as spam, however well-targeted it might be. It is a formula for failure.

{Cross posted in various forms at Vancouver Drupal Camp Group, Urban Vancouver and Now Public - please spread the word}

First there was an idea, then we chose a date (May 9-10), set up a relevant Drupal Group, now there is a location (SFU Wosk Centre and Workspace) and finally a Drupal Camp Vancouver website.

Indeed, the rag-tag band of volunteers is steadily working to wrangle Drupal Camp Vancouver into a knowledge-sharing fest of unparalleled fun and untold benefits.

Consider this notice that DrupalCampVancouver.org is alive and slowly percolating up with the relevant details and useful information including Sponsor info (and checklist), Volunteer info (and organizer props), and the important Call for Speakers.

Registration will open this week so keep your eyes open for details to be among the chosen.

For those who don't know, Drupal is an open source Content Management System which powers many of your other favorite community driven sites like Now Public, Net Squared and Urban Vancouver plus activist minded projects like desmogblog, happyfrog.ca and many many more.

How can you help?

Great question! 'Tis a busy time for all (including many involved with Open Web this week) so volunteers are important to spread the work around. Big thanks to those who've signed on so far. Have a bit of time? Then consider signing up by Contacting the organizers to help out (no big deal eh) and see ya at DrupalCampVancouver.org.

You know spring has sprung when your calendar is full of conference dates. Below are a few upcoming events I thought you might be interested in:

1. Social Innovation Camp
London, UK
April 4-6, 2008
Social Innovation Camp will bring together web developers, designers and social change makers to develop 6 "web tools to change the world":

Barcode Wikipedia
Enabled by Design
Personal Development Reports
Prison Visits
Rate My CV
Stuffshare

2. Aspiration and Idealware's Managing Nonprofit Technology Projects II
Oakland, CA
May 20-21, 2008
Managing Nonprofit Technology Projects will examine the tools and best practices that will help nonprofits deliver successful technology solutions - whether websites, packaged software implementations, or custom applications.

TechSoup will be hosting a free, one-day online event, Using Virtual Worlds & Emerging Technologies for People with Disabilities, this Friday, February 29th.

This interactive event will take place in two online locations: Second Life, and TechSoup's Community Forums.

Three Free, Easy Ways to Add a Calendar to Your Web Site - Putting a calendar on your Web site can be a great way to keep supporters up-to-date on important events, meetings, and deadlines. All you need is an Internet connection, a Web browser, and a bit of spare time.

This caught my attention because I see it's more like an events diary than a calandar. It's available as a module in DotNetNuke as I suspect it is in most CMS products.

 In fact my own organisation uses such a product, not to keep track of our events but as a revenue generating facilities management product which yeilds the funds needed to maintain our human rights advocacy.

I'll be there late Friday night - Monday late afternoon, and would love to meet folks, talk shop, imbibe.

On AIM: ianwrootslab; on gtalk: iwilker. 

-- Ian

The Commons is a free wiki-based online newsmagazine about non-profits that serve the Silicon Valley, the people behind them, and the people that they help -- written, edited & produced by students and other volunteers in the valley.

Purpose

There are hundreds of organizations and thousands of people engaged in good work in the Valley. They feed our hungry, shelter our homeless, heal our sick, teach our children, protect our communities, give strength to the powerless, and hope to those who had lost all hope. Their stories are extraordinary, but often left untold. The principal mission of this project is to get their stories told.