Publish your events with a Creative Commons licence

Sutton Active has taken its first step towards making all of its information available under a licence that lets anyone use and republish it freely.

All new events added to the calendar must allow republication according to the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike licence. This gives Sutton Active and everyone else the right to
use, modify, distribute and republish the event information so long as two conditions are met:

• Attribution — you must give credit to the original contributors and Sutton Active
• Share Alike — you are free to modify the information and republish it so long as your modifications are also published under the same licence.

Using this licence will make it possible for other people to use this information in ways that suits them. They might publish it on their own website or in a newsletter, add it to their organisation’s intranet calendar, or who knows?

And really, that’s the point. I don’t know how people might want to use this information but I do want them to have the right to do so. And now they have.

If you have any questions about licencing issues please contact me and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Easily add new events to the calendar

I’ve made it much easier to add events to the calendar. You no longer need to be an administrator or editor of a group to add an event for that group — so there’s no need to ask permission to be “promoted” before you can put things in the calendar for a group.

This comes with one “catch” though. If you’re not an administrator or editor for the group organising the event you’re adding, the group will receive an email from you telling them that you’ve added an event. If they want to contact you about this, they just have to reply to the email.

I hope this will make life easier for people. If you want to add an event, just register (if you haven’t already), login and do it.

New home page design

Sutton Active has a new home page. The redesign focuses on the two most frequently-changing things on the site: events and news items.

The events column on the left has been restyled to be a great deal clearer and easier to read. The event date is featured in a beigey-yellow calendar-style box which is also replicated larger on the individual event pages. I’ll be using this style for event listings across the whole site so they’re instantly recognisable.

New to the home page is the news column on the right. News items (culled from our member groups’ RSS and Atom feeds) have only been on Sutton Active for a week but it’s already time to give them due prominence. This is a great opportunity for groups to get their news in front of a wider audience. Publish to your own site/blog and your item will automatically be shown on Sutton Active’s home page for the next few days.

Out goes the section listing the latest groups to be added to the site. This didn’t change very often and I felt that having this on the home page gave it undue prominence. The feature has now disappeared completely, but it might make a resurgence in the groups section when I redesign that.

I hope the new home page will give a useful instant snapshot of what’s going on in Sutton and make it very clear to new visitors what Sutton Active is all about.

Until the next redesign…