(Un)eventful Leicester

How many times have you missed an interesting event in Leicester because you hadn't heard about it, only to read about it in the paper or hear a friend raving about it afterwards?

Twice in the last few weeks I have heard tales of permanent Leicestershire residents who had never even heard of the Leicester Comedy Festival.

Yet all over the city there are myriad events happening from big festivals right down to small club and society meetings. The current provision of city event information gives the impression of a dead city with nothing to do which is wholly incorrect.

Why can't we get better, in-advance access to "what's on" information in Leicester?

I am putting this question to the City Centre Management Board because it is something we're not getting right at the moment. This blog post is based on some of the points I will be making...

I think the immediate cause of this problem is that the current provision of “What’s On” event information in Leicester is an uncoordinated patchwork of different sites each carrying their own separate, sometimes overlapping information.

Here are some examples:-

http://www.leicester.gov.uk/festivals-events.asp

http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/leicester/hi/things_to_do/

http://www.goleicestershire.com/entertainment/

http://whatson.oneleicester.com/

http://www.thisisleicestershire.co.uk/goingoutguide

None of these sites are comprehensive enough to be truly useful to a visitor and the results are at best, people don’t know what is going on and at worst, perceive that little is happening.

Additionally, most of the ‘official’ sites above cater primarily for larger events and neglect the many smaller events run by clubs, societies, bars, restaurants, etc, which are just as important to the entertainment mix as the bigger events.

We need a strategy where we all pool our event information and all help promote each other’s events.

I am putting forward a proposal to use an Internet-based solution. This would comprise a single database but accept event submission from multiple sources (especially RSS feeds) and allow access to the resulting data via multiple channels (especially RSS, social media & email). By simple tagging, such a system could allow visitors or webmasters to get custom event data based on whatever they are interested and have it in a format of their choosing.

Technologically speaking, none of this is particularly difficult.

What it would require is a team effort on the part of event hosts (and particularly the larger stakeholders such as the city council, universities, etc) to agree to collaborate for the greater good of the city. It would also require a certain amount of moderation to weed out offensive or poorly written event content.

Are we smart enough to work together on something like this? If we are then I think we'd fully earn the right to call ourselves 'One Leicester'.