Sneak Preview of New Region-wide Calendar

Our new region-wide community calendar was previewed to a select group of people at this past week's MAC Alliance Awards Luncheon, and I've decided that the readers of FunWithNetworking deserve to be let in on the fun, too. Go to macalliance.basecampbusiness.com and sign on up! You're one of the lucky few who are getting an early look at this calendar...

I say "our" new community calendar for two reasons: first, I'm on the team that's putting it together; second, it's a "community calendar", so you own it too (metaphorically, at least).

I'm really excited about this. I've been working hard on keeping my own little calendar going since last summer, simply because I saw a need for a single, unified calendar that pulled all the events happening all over the Philadelphia region. I was frustrated because I lacked the resources to grow it larger.

When Mel Baiada and David Epstein at Basecamp Business came looking to talk with me in March, they offered me the opportunity to join what I was doing with a much more powerful regional calendar for business events. The MAC Alliance has stepped up to be the first to host this regional calendar on its web site, but this is a region-wide collaborative effort to meet a region-wide need, so I expect this calendar to be appearing on web sites all over the Philadelphia region. Seriously, this could be big stuff.



Among the cool features:

• Events are tagged by Subject, so you can filter events to pick out specific areas of interest. You don't have to have the "firehose" of events I've had with the FunWithNetworking calendar.
• You can filter by distance from a zip code, and the Event Profile event shows you a map of the meeting location
• You can sign up for a weekly e-mail newsletter, sent on Wednesday, that will keep you up-to-date with next week's events (filtered for your interests)

You can use the calendar without signing up, but I encourage you to sign up and become part of the community. I'd also love your feedback on how we can improve the new calendar. Add an event, if we've managed to overlook one. Also, please let your friends and colleagues know about this calendar.

At this point, I haven't decided what to do with the FunWithNetworking calendar and the TWIP postings. It doesn't take too much effort to maintain, but it is effort that now duplicates the effort I'm putting into the Basecamp Business calendar. And I hate duplicated effort.