The Dream ∘∘ Team
Our moto could quite easily be "Good things come to those who wait" for we know a thing or two about keeping calm are being laid back. Time flies as they say, but there is nothing quite like hanging back, chilling and watching the world go by. Now just add a dash of "southern" comfort some warm embraces and you have yourself the perfect environment or as we say over here happy days ♡
[ intro ]
You've probably read a brief history about the [London Tango Calendar] which was established back in 2012. How the original team behind this super popular agenda has moved on or away from London and how we decided to open up the calendar to organisers & tanguer@s who want to contribute & support this valued resource.
Our goal was to have as little input into the Calendar going forward and we were doing quite well as you can imagine, when all of a sudden this "cheeky Tanguera" and her friend who were visiting London happened to stumble upon our Calendar by accident and contacted us. She loved our community project idea and we got talking about all sorts of things before she suddenly asked us if we could build a site for her & all her travelling mates. Naturally curiousity got the better of us and not only did we start working on a new website to host Tango events, another superb idea surfaced which we will come to in just a moment.
Oh boy, we really didn't see all this coming!
Well as mentioned already the whole purpose of our recent move to open up & turn our beloved Calendar into a community project was due to us having less time on our hands these days. Why on earth we decided to build a new website for travelling Tango nomads (tomads) and then extending this to offer support to other Tango communities who also want to implement their own version of our popular Calendar we will never know. We must be mad! Yes totally Tango mad tomads
So we set ourselves a big no make that huge task. And unfortunately for us we are true to our word.
With a little faith we should see our community project grow and flourish 🌸
Any impromements or enhancements over time will be shared across the entire community happy days ♡
[ how we operate ]
Of course everyone who has worked with us over the years knows how we roll. Everything we do in our spare time is out of the goodness of our hearts and completely voluntary. This has and always will be the case, it is our policy. Any new website project we take on, provided we have time and resources available, will have minimal cost implicaitons if anything and we choose technology platforms that allow us to aim for as close to zero running costs as we can possibly achiece. With a little luck any donations we receive will cover our low overheads and prevent us having to pursue the dreaded advertisment route. Fingers crossed!
The beauty of Tango to a certain extent lies in the ability to be creative and the whole improvisation aspect. We feel this has also been a dominant factor in our website story, growing steadily, looking to be creative and ready to improvise and bloom into something more beautiful 🌸
And one fundamental idea that came out of our discussions with the "techies" is linked to the inspirational notion of "Open Source". We immediately realised that this concept was awesome and that we need to move in the direction of an open community project. This is exactly what we had in mind when we decided to work on our new website project.
Initially this means putting in a little extra work & effort from our end and to share the fruits of our labour with the community to start with. Hopefully our project will grow in strenght and allow us all to openly share ideas and work together on enhancements & improvements to benefit the entire community. That is why we aptly called our project "Community Source".
At this point we better remind everyone that time & resources are of limited supply, especially with our current busy work/life quite litterally hanging in balance. However this is exactly why we have been prepared to put in the extra work and build something that is simple to use & maintain and only requires little to no effort in the long run. We believe we have done a great job and our website is now more or less ready for a new begining.
[ what it takes ]
All it takes are a couple of local community members to kickstart a regional Calendar project and to keep an eye out & act as a goto for other community members who want to start contributing.
After all we do not need to look back far to see how a few people can make a huge difference. We can count the weeks from the time we were about to quite literally "throw in the towel " when we thought the end of the road was looming for our [London Tango Calendar] to a sudden U-turn and building an entirely new Tango community projects for the likes of our new continental "tomad" friends and looking forward to our awesome "Community Source" project.
[ great support & contributions ]
We are extremely greatful to all the totally amazing people who have generously supported us over the years as well as the new team members responsible for our recent website refresh and the new project. We simply could not have done it without you!
Our projects are getting more challenging each year but even so we feel the need to keep our principles in check and maintain a voluntary work ethic. On top of everything we firmly believe in staying away from commercialising our beloved website even though it probably could earn us quite a few shillings. After all the [London Tango Calendar] alone generates in excess of 5000+ visitors every month, many from Tangoer@s across Europe and beyond. As far as we know it is by far one of the most popular local Tango calendars in existence and it sure could earn us some much needed dosh! But no thanks, not if we cannot help it. We will try to keep our principles in check and besides who on earth likes websites trashed by irritating adverts, right?
In any case we would not have been able to get this far without the support of various volunteers over the years and to some extent we rely on their generosity and willingness to help us grow from strenght to strenght. Perhaps our website evolution would have been far more rapid if we had full time staff, however "Good things come to those who wait" and we suspect we would not have grown in the same way if we done anything other then go with the flow and let nature take its course. We are proud of our site and all the messages and kind words of support we keep on getting from visitors and people who use our site on a regular basis. They constantly fill us with gratitude and encouragement, which not only makes us go on but prompts us to pursue even greater projects.
Currently we are extremly happy to be working with some great local individuals on our new project and we relish and look forward to working with other contributors in times to come.
If you think you can be useful in any way shape or form please feel free to contact us using the details at the bottom of the page.
[ we need you ]
We would love to grow & build something truly beautiful
And that is why we are always open to ideas on how we can improve on what we do, so do not be shy come talk to us
If you like what we are doing and want to join us as a regional representative or if you are a technically gifted individual who loves what we are up to and want to be part of our "Community Source" project by all means do drop us a line.
To provide some indication of the ideas floating around in our minds (none of which are set in stone) here is a list of contributors and various technical skills we believe might come in handy.
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Each local Calendar is run by a group of local Tangue@s who help oversee and support their "community website". Any local Tanguer@ who knows the Tango scene can freely join the team and help it grow and 🌸
Just so we are clear you are our heart & soul, our lifeline, the secret to our success, what makes us tick, so amazing, you are all absolutely fabulous ♡
We need people just like you & me above everything else so please come join the team. The more the merrier
🄲🄾🄽🅃🄸🄱🅄🅃.🄰🄳🄾🅁
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We already have some great ideas on how to improve our global & regional Tango community websites but unfortunately we cannot do it alone. Resources, time and perhaps some of the following skills to drive our project ambitions forward are always welcome
Click on the following skillsets to find out more
Google / Facebook & APIs
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We use Google Calendars throughout our Blogger websites for good reason, because it's free & robust for a start with no end of life in sight even though Google just recently decided to ditch g+ at the drop of a hat . Obviously things could change down the line, but we are reasonalbly confident these will remain our core focus for some time to come.
Similarly we also interface with Facebook as well as Maps and are working more with APIs in general which seems to be the way with things nowadays.
If you have experience working with Google / Facebook or APIs you may very well be able to help us improve our community project. If you want to contribute your skills give us a shout, we would ℓσνє to hear any ideas you have.
Designer
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We think we have done a pretty good job in our latest website refresh, adding Bootstrap elements to our website run on the Google Blogger platform (yes we know, but it is free) to make it far more responsive for mobile devices.
However we are not techies in the true sense of the word and the recent website improvements were done by a dear friend who is not an out & out techie either, but has done a tremendous job to revive our current site and we are eternaly greatful for all the recent influx of ideas & contributions.
We would be happy to have other laid back design gurus spice things up for us, perhaps carry on improving the look & feel of our current site or even go one step furter and work on our next facelift to really make everything 🌸
Always happy to chat so please drop us line, we would ℓσνє to hear your inspirational ideas.
Coder
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We are also very much interested in people with good coding exposure.
Over the past few years Google has refreshed its Google Calendar & Map solutions but sadly neglected to do the same for their embedded iFrame offering. Now our patience is kinda legendary but even we started to give up hope regarding an improved iFrame offering so we jumped at the chance to use an amazing Open Source calendar solution that allows us to do some pretty cool stuff. It does have some tiuny drawbacks but we simply found it impossible to resist.
Our new website utilises an amazing Javascript event calendar called "fullCalendar" and as such we had to get up to speed with a fair bit of JS coding). Our gut feeling tells us that we've done a pretty good job considering our current team members, but we are confident a decent coder could do a far better job.
If you are a proper Coder and want to contribute and improve our "community project", please get in touch as we really would ℓσνє to hear from you.
Anything is possible with the right mindset & willingness to create beauty ♡
🅃🄴🄲🄷🄽🄾🄻🄾🄶.🄸🅂🅃🄰
The thing to bear in mind is that the above is only a wish list at the end of the day.
Any technologically gifted individual is welcome to contribute their skills to our project.
So what are you waiting for? Get in touch, we would ℓσνє to talk to you
