Public events discovery – Scope

Discovery (proposed)

Rationale

Bates College is a lively place, with numerous meetings, lectures, performance, and other public events serving many campus groups. Raising awareness of those gatherings is a key factor in on- and off-campus community-building.

Although a scheduling system is in use at Bates, it is not configured to support an editorial workflow for public communications, the current version does not support open standards, and is not available as a data source or for customizable presentation.

Therefore, a discovery project would determine and prioritize possible features in a public event calendar system and estimate order-of-magnitude costs.

Focus groups would meet a total of 3-5 times  to develop recommendations.

Purpose

Evaluate and prioritize features for a system to provide information about group and public events for the campus and region.

Goals

• Improve communication with community and region.
• Improve quality and accuracy of public event information.
• Increase availability and accessibility of time-based information via multiple distribution/subscription models.

Objectives

• Identify possible features for the system.
• Prioritize features that would provide the greatest benefit to focus group members.
• Identify costs for the top three to five features so management can make an informed go/no-go decision to explore solutions in greater detail.

Deliverables

• List of all potential features (as best as can be identified during the discovery period).
• List of prioritized features, as ranked by surveying a focus group comprised of Web constituents.
• Order-of-magnitude estimates of development/support life-cycle, or other costs (commercial-off-the-shelf products or open source systems) for the top three-to-five features.
• Identify obstacles in the way of developing/integrating features.
• Anticipated delivery schedule and implementation plan.

Project Constraints

Limited resources for project management.

Success Criteria

Final report, integrating client input, will provide enough context for management to make a go/no-go decision.