Public Calendars and Classification: First Problem

Some folks already know that I’ve been researching institutional calendar software throughout teh intarnets. I’ve found a few decent tools, probably four candidates with one strong open source tool and one strong vendor solution. I know a lot more about the open source tool now, since all their product information is in the open. The vendor still hasn’t called me, despite my email. (While their site lists all the important features we need, there are no screenshots or demos to play with and a general lack of detail.)
Meanwhile I’ve got the open source Bedework up and running with a “quickstart” release, piece of cake. I had my doubts about it at first, the end-users docs are pretty thin and don’t explain the basic organization of the calendar suite very well. I had my doubts that it could fit our needs, despite it being designed from the ground up for educational institutions. Then I found the developer wiki. Surprise, the wiki covers the basics so much better than the PDFs written for administrators.
So, coming around to the point, I found this nugget of truthiness, which gets at what I see as a large information sharing problem here at UNC. The high-level objective for the calendar is to create more multidisciplinary participation in events, see the Chancellor’s report on intellectual climate. In order to get there you have to classify events on the public calendar by topic, not department. We just tried to address similar issues on the ITS site, focusing on recognizable topics instead of organizational divisions in our service categories. I think the tension between organizational and topical categories can be found in many campus information systems. The problem this creates is especially obvious when you consider new arrivals to campus or prospective students/faculty. They don’t know whether to look at the cashiers office, the registrar or admissions for relevant information.