Earlier this week the team at Say Yeah! released the Toronto Events Calendar, which works based on some ideas of a wiki where users can add their own events to the calendar. It’s really a slick tool and I recommend people and event organizers go on and load it up with as many different events that they can think of.

Right off the bat when I saw the calendar, a thought occurred to me.

“This is it. This is what we need.”

The idea of an event wiki is not new, but the way this calendar is able to fill such a need for our community in Toronto is a great example of how a collaborative system, properly applied enables us to accomplish more than we ever could separately. TOGeekEvents ran a great calendar, TorCamp ran a great calendar, but when we have an open system that’s flexible enough to integrate into the existing registration systems we already use like Meetup.com or Eventbrite, then we all benefit from it:

• There’s only a single reference to share,
• A single feed to follow,
• There’s less competition amongst competing calendar managers,
• More freedom to add smaller niche events,
• Increase attendance overall,
• Increase social practice of adding and contributing in our community.

Community created, community run, community focused applications are amazing. We should have more of them. I and downloaded JobberBase and installed it at http://torontodev.ca/jobs/ not because there are not enough different cool sources for jobs in Toronto, but because I could see the community benefiting from a job board that: wasn’t tied into any particular business, was open to submissions from the community, and that could provide the same sort of advantages from the preceding points (though my lack of promotion and lack of updating this blog were detrimental to say the least).

An event calendar is only the start, but the Say Yeah! calendar did a great job to set the tone for what we should be striving for when creating new applications. We should be finding out different wiki, or  community-centric applications the Toronto community could be benefiting from. We could benefit so much from having more applications built and suited for the Toronto Tech and Social Media community. By, and for the community is the way to do it. These applications would be “community-centric” in the terms of being:

• Community created,
• Community managed,
• And For the benefit of our community.

What other types of wiki systems could help us focus our efforts and add more value to the community? Some ideas might include:

• Job board
• Idea board
• Unconference organizer tool.

An exploration of what practical sorts of wiki systems and how they could help Toronto’s tech, or other communities, would be an interesting discussion that might be appropriate for Toronto Wiki Tuesday, maybe as a sort of town hall.

The collaborative route could go further than any of these examples as well. We could do something at a higher level and more positive even and create a positive place for community members to share their goals whether they be career, technical, educational, and provide a place to look for and to get support from others to achieve those goals. Of course maybe not all of these projects would technically be wikis, but like wikis, they could take advantage of the community centric approach to encouraging participation and being a place to add value to a common place for the benefit of all others,

To solve problems is what we need. To move forward is what we need. To be creative is what we need. To add to the community is what we need.

If you’re in, say yeah!