i just want to throw a little push in here for all the visitors – what’s the point of this site, really?
well, it started with the calendar problem. i was trying to schedule my photo-work around a large and expanding community of dancers, spread across a fairly large geographic region. as you can imagine, there’s something happening somewhere pretty much all the time, so it becomes an exercise in prioritization. but to prioritize, you have to know what’s available. and therein lies the rub.
what i found in my personal experience was two kinds of calendars – the individual, personal calendar, which has the advantage of being kept very up-to-date, but the disadvantage of covering a big geographic area (see artemis), for one person, making much of the information… well… useless. the other calendar is the regional organization calendar, which has the advantage of geographic focus and performer diversity, but the problem that it’s usually just one person that has to do all the updates, so sometimes the calendar gets out-of-sync with reality.
so, after a couple rounds of experiments with calendar stuff (and we’re not done yet!), here we are. what you have here is a group-edited regional calendar. of course, you can browse through the whole thing with that link, or you can narrow your browsing to just maryland or just workshops – whatever suits you.
for the really geeky, you can also pick up that information in a customized rss feed, which you can integrate directly into your own calendar.
now, to be sure, there are still problems – not the least of which is that this system doesn’t handle recurring events (every wednesday at…) very well at all. but, i hope it’s a step in the right direction, and i want to encourage everyone out there to take advantage of it.