Problem: One of the biggest issues in the Boulder Jewish community has been the fact that there was no one single place to go to check a common calendar for all of the various organizations in town. Each Jewish congregation (reform temple, conservative synagogue, modern orthodox, renewal congregations) had their own calendar posted on each of their websites. Each of the Jewish organizations (Boulder JCC, CU Jewish Studies Program, CU Hillel, etc) also had their own events.
In the past, there had been several efforts made to create a ‘combined’ calendar. The problem: each organization had to submit their events to the central calendar, who then had to post the events. Some had a form to fill out, some wanted them via email. But it took a lot of time and energy for each organization to continuously submit events to each and every Jewish calendar. And if the event time or location changed (or was cancelled), it was like the story of the feather pillow up on top of a mountain: there was no way to get it back.
In this economic climate, nobody had the time to devote to doing extra tasks like typing events into alternative calendars. One organization, for example, had a volunteer whose task each month was to spend 10 hours of time entering events into various community Jewish calendars.
The Solution:
The solution was to have everyone adopt a common calendar format that could then be syndicated to other sites via RSS / XML feeds.
This allowed us to build one site, www.BoulderJews.org, that has the combined calendars of 19 organizations in Boulder (and counting).
Does your community need something like this? We’d be happy to help… Call Jeff Finkelstein (founder of Customer Paradigm and husband of Rabbi Jamie Korngold, the Adventure Rabbi) at 303.499.9313.