LoCo Directory developers would like some input

[Laura Czajkowski]

Aloha!

As many of you know the LoCo directory is up and running and with that 
is the events section.  Many teams have added their Global Jam details 
to it, well done it's looking great!  I'm posting here as the developers 
would like some feed back on the below issue, I've included the bug this 
related to, please, please add your comments to the bug if you have any 
thoughts on it.

Currently, team event times in loco.ubuntu.com are treated as local time 
for the location of the event. However, loco.ubuntu.com itself runs on 
UTC time.
This poses a problem when we try to calculate "past" or "future" events, 
as we don't necessarily know what timezone offset the local event is using.

The simplest solution, from a development perspective, is to threat team 
event times as UTC time, not the team's local time. However, there is 
concern that this will be inconvenient or overly burdensome on event 
organizers and attendees.

The must user friendly solution will require calculating timezones based 
on venue data, or requiring the user to specify the timezone for each 
event themselves.

This will require significant code changes on the back end.

Our question to the community is, what would be the impact on your use 
of loco.ubuntu.com for planning local events, if times were entered and 
displayed in UTC,instead of local time. If the burden is not great, we 
will do that. If the burden is enough to significantly impact usage, we 
will go the more difficult (for us) route.

The bug that we are discussing is 
https://bugs.launchpad.net/loco-directory/+bug/531970

Please add all of your comments to this bug!

Laura

-- 

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/czajkowski
http://www.lczajkowski.com
Skype: lauraczajkowski