LoCo Directory developers would like some input

[NICK VERBECK]

Whats the potential of just letting the event organizer enter the time
with timezone, then store that value in the DB as UTC along with the
timezone that it was entered against. Then when a user visits the page
use Javascript and Ajax to store against that users session there
timezone, and just change out all the times to display as there
timezone. And just as a safety for when you don't know a users
timezone. ie the initial request to the site. Just display the time in
the timezone that it was entered against. Just make sure to include
the TZ info when displaying the time.

This does add a bit of work on a developer side but does benefit event
organizers and anyone browsing the site.

On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 9:57 AM, Dan Trevino <dantrevino at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 1:41 PM, Laura Czajkowski <laura at lczajkowski.com> wrote:
>> 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
>>
>
> The target audience for this needs to see local times.
>
> Just thinking out loud here, each of the LoCo teams should already be
> associated with one-to-many timezone(s).  Why not just ask the event
> creator to specify it?
>
> For my case, when I create a new event for Florida, I should see a
> drop down with two timezones, Eastern and Central.  California or
> France or India may not see the drop down because they only have one.
>
> If nobody wants to go through the small data entry task of entering
> teams and their associated TZ, then just allow the team admin(s) to
> select default timezone(s) available for their team.
>
> Dan
> ---
> Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Open Standards!
>
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>



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