It might be a good idea to update the jams listed
|
My wife and I drove 45 miles to find the Bluegrass shop with a sign "closed for good" posted in the window. We planned on visiting the Friday night MeetUp but I decided to check before we drove the 30 miles to it & Joe e-mailed me back saying "No More Friday night meet ups. The open mic at Sweetwater was held though and we enjoyed the tunes, not ready to do that type of thing yet (Newbies). But we'll keep trying :) Submitted by Michael T on Fri, 2008/01/25 - 7:10am. Last edited 25 Jan 2008
|
- Login or register to post comments
- Email this page
September 30, 2007
Good on you, Scott - it is a good practice and probably the best what you can do now, considering the fact that it is all done in your free time. However, maybe one thing is also crucial - it is the history of the newly added jam to your site. I guess if you had in your system a question "Jam history: When did your regular jam sessions started?", and "What is an average number of attendees?" you could contact the jams with short history in shorter time spans, and rely on those longer running and with more patrons for staying around longer.
But it definitely pays off confirming before coming for the first time, as for example my very first jam session of this year can testify - it was for the first time in three years that I couldn't come - I was lying sick - and only four people attended, and we had a BBC reporter coming to make an interview!!! (She made it though, anyway :-) So, anything can happen even with the long running jams.
United States
March 23, 2006
Alarix,
Thanks for the kind words. We are doing this site in our spare moments, but we are sparing as much time as we can. :)
I disagree with you that the longevity of the session should change how frequently we double check on the event. While there is indeed more momentum behind long established sessions, the venue that hosts the session may close just as easily as the central figure of the session moves out of town.
We actually did consider collecting information on how many people were regulars at the jam when we were initially designing the site. We decided against collecting it as a formal field. Why? Our logic was that we wanted to collect only the most common information as fields on the form, and leave the rest to the description. Asking for too much on the input form is a concern for us.
Here are one of our criteria for formally capturing a value in a field: would anybody do a search where they only wanted information on the size of the jam session? While it is good to know that a given session typically attracts 10 people vs 75, is it something you would search for? Would you be more likely to ask? "Show me all the bluegrass sessions near Prague" or "Show me all the jams that typically have more than 18 people at them."
Size of the session didn't end up as a field because we didn't think it was critical enough to have as a data field on the form. Now, listing it in the jam session description is certainly helpful.
Perhaps this was poor logic on our part. I'll open up the question to anybody reading this forum post: how important is knowing how many people are typically at a jam session?
Totally off topic, we love that the site is attracting sessions from places such as Prague. Our original scope was for Kansas City only, and we expanded our target to all of the States, then all of North America and then from there we worked hard to make the site work across all of the globe. Thanks for making that effort worthy.
Scott
United States
March 23, 2006
Michael,
I'm sorry to hear that. I've had a nearly identical experience, and because of that here's what we do with jam session listings on folkjam.org.
Six months after somebody posts a jam session we automatically send them a request to verify the details of the jam session. If they reply, we reset the clock and ask again six months later. If they don't respond, we ask again a month later. If they don't respond to the second request they get one final request to verify the jam session a month after that. If they never respond to our validation request, we pull the listing from the site automatically. The listing remains in our database, but it does not show up on any maps or calendars.
We delist about 15% of our events every month with this system to help people avoid the situation you and your wife ran into, but it is not perfect. The worst case situation is that somebody posts a jam and it is canceled the next day - in that case an incorrect jam will sit on our site for eight months before being pulled down. Even with that imperfection though, we believe our system is better than any other jam listing site on the net, where it is typically up to a single maintainer to keep up with the jams they list on their site. That's a ton of work (I've done it), and listings can sit up on a site for years after the session is over.
It is good that you confirmed the Friday night meet-up. We put a reminder to 'confirm before you go' at the bottom of every single post in the hopes that people won't waste time heading to an out of date event. Still, I apologize that you had a poor first outing. Keep trying, this music really is fun to play and the friends made through it have been lasting for me.
Scott