Yesterday, I learned that a volunteer had set up an event on DFA Link for the Lamont Campaign. Already, 46 people have signed up for the event. It is a great idea and I’m very glad the event will happen. However, as the technologist for the Lamont campaign, I wish that it had been set up on Lamont website. As a person who has recently started playing with Facebook, I thought, maybe it would be good to set up the event there as well. How about on the Democrat Party’s PartyBuilder, or on more general calendars like Google Calendar or Yahoo!’s Upcoming.org?

The plethora of options reflect, what I think is a need as more people put more events online, some set of Events Central tools. One tool that would be really nice would be something like is something like Pingoat. With Pingoat, you can ping a large number of blog tracking services to let them know that your blog has been updated. There is a checklist of sites that can be pinged. It would be great if a similar tool could be built for setting events. Fill out the necessary information, check which sites should get a listing of the event, and off you go. For that matter, if I were a major campaign vendor, I would consider adding options to my event system so when I add an event to the system, I could also add it to public systems like Upcoming, Facebook, or Google Calendars.

Another thing that would be nice would be better sharing of events between systems. Some events systems, like Blue State Digital’s which powers the Lamont campaign and the Democratic Party, and Upcoming.org, allow you to subscribe to events as RSS feeds. Other’s like Google and Drupal support iCal. Some allow export, some allow import, some allow both. Currently, I’m subscribing to several different calendar feeds via Bloglines. It would be great to see more systems support both iCal and RSS both for incoming and outgoing.

These are the easy parts. Where it gets more complicated is how you deal with RSVPs. Besides trying to get people to events, campaigns use event tools to build mailing lists. As noted above, the people who signed up the DFALink event are added to DFA’s mailing list, but not to the Lamont mailing list. It would be great if a secure and authenticated protocol could be established so that if a person signs up for a DFALink event, they could optionally let their information be shared with other events RSVP (and mailing lists systems). This of course is a Holy Grail that I doubt we’ll see anytime soon, but some of the other tools could easily be built.

Anything else interesting going on?