CUNY Academic Commons

Just wanted to chime in here with a use case:

A bunch of groups at the GC (GC Digital Initiatives, New Media Lab, Library, Futures Initiative, Career Center, Teaching Center) offer workshops and would like not to duplicate one another's work and also not to conflict with one another's workshops (if possible). We have a private group to have conversations about what we are offering.

In past years, we would ask a Digital Fellow to add all events to the GC Digital Initiatives site calendar using Events Organizer. But now that we have events here, we could just have everyone add them to a group calendar.

So, a few questions about which I am unclear:

-- can a private group have a public calendar?
-- how can a group calendar best be shared? Is there a feed that can be imported into a site or is a public group URL to the event page of the group the only way to do this?

Hope I'm not sidetracking us on this ticket, but I do wonder how I can best accomplish the goals of various groups here using our new tool

Hope I'm not sidetracking us on this ticket

You are, but I guess it's OK. It may be that the privacy stuff needs a rethink.

can a private group have a public calendar?

No. Calendars are pages within a group, and no one can access a page within a group except for members of that group. Furthermore, non-public groups cannot have non-public events. We made the decision during development that we would force event privacy levels to match the privacy level of the groups, because to make it more flexible - especially given the fact that an event can be associated with multiple groups - is very hard to conceptualize. I realize that this makes your use case trickier. But it's not clear, to me at least, how the UX would work, even in broad strokes. Ideas are most welcome.

how can a group calendar best be shared? Is there a feed that can be imported into a site or is a public group URL to the event page of the group the only way to do this?

I forget off the top of my head how this works, but Ray will know. I don't think group calendars currently have feeds - this is something in the 1.9 milestone, I think. How this will work with private groups is yet to be decided; we threw around the idea of having some sort of private key for concatenating the feed URLs.

Thanks, Boone. Of course, we can always just create a public group and add events to it. That would mean we'd use a private group for private discussion and a public group just for events, which is a bit kludgy and confusing, but it would work.

I do think it would be cool for there to be a toggle that would allow one of the following:

• group admins to make all group events of a private group public (on the grounds that it would be simpler to do this as a blanket switch rather than event by event)
• event creators to choose to make particular events in a private group public

In either case, we'd need to think about how that group's calendar would be viewed, as non-members wouldn't be able to access the page. Maybe one thing to think about is a visual presentation of an exported group calendar (maybe titled the "public calendar") that would be outside of the group interface so that non-members could see it.

1. Within the Publish area of the event creation page it currently says, "You have added a group to this event. Since groups have their own privacy settings, we have removed the ability to set the status for this event." Is it possible to have this text more clearly reflect the privacy settings of the groups that have been added to the event? Such as 'The group "Sam's Group" has a privacy setting of "Private", therefore this event will be visible to group-members only"

It's possible, but it would require at least another query when the page loads.

The other issue is how we have set up event privacy with multiple BuddyPress groups.

Let's say an event is attached to both a public and private group. In this case, the event automatically becomes private, however we do allow access to this event if a user is a member of the public group.

Let's say someone is editing this event from the public group, what message do we display to the user?

2. There could also be a line in the event page that says 'This event is public" or "This group is private to 'Sam's Group' and 'CUNY Academic Commons Team'".

I think this line only makes sense if you are viewing the event from within a user's profile. There is already a line in the "Event Details" section showing the "Connected Groups", but doesn't show the privacy level of the group.

I don't think group calendars currently have feeds - this is something in the 1.9 milestone, I think. How this will work with private groups is yet to be decided; we threw around the idea of having some sort of private key for concatenating the feed URLs.

Boone and I have already started some conversations about having an iCal feed here - #4524.