The calendar

The calendar is where your group keeps its dates. What is coming, where it is, and who plans to be there.

You add each event. A single afternoon or a run of days, with a place and an address, a time or an all-day marker, and any details worth saying. An event can hold more than one time, so something that meets on a Friday evening and again on a Saturday morning stays one event rather than two. Members see the events meant for them on a month calendar with a readable list beneath it, and nothing they are not meant to see. You can edit or remove any event in place.

Some events ask something of the group. Turn on sign-ups and each member gets a quiet way to say they will be there, maybe, or that they cannot make it, while you get a roster of who is going, who is waiting, who said maybe, and who cannot make it. Or pop an event to members instead, and each is asked once with the same three answers. Either way you see their names. Each member sees their own answer, and on a sign-up sheet how many are going and waiting, never who. Set a limit when the room only holds so many, and anyone past it waits in line instead of being turned away. A maybe never takes a place and never joins the line. When the list is settled you can close sign-ups, and the names you already have are kept.

The letter carries the calendar too. Its Calendar section lists each single event coming up in the next six weeks, plus anything newly added further out, so an event stays in each letter as a reminder until it happens. A repeating event shows its next date when you first set it up or change it.

The calendar is not a bulletin board that empties every week. It is the group's shared sense of what is ahead, held in one place so no one has to carry the whole schedule in their own memory.