It's generally fine with us if you want to post local events held by outside writer's groups, libraries or other kinds of writing communities. You are welcome to post about your events in our regional spaces. However, we do ask that you 1) create an actual event inside the regional calendar (as opposed to mentioning it in regional chat and linking off to it) and 2) limit each posting to the discrete details of the event taking place on the chosen date. Here's why:
- Using the event description space to explain or advertise your outside organization or to link to an outside RSVP process is causing confusion, and it creates an administrative burden for NaNoWriMo staff (in the form of help desk tickets and chat moderation for people who don't understand the event and in the form of regional complaints). Because our events page has a built-in RSVP feature and a chat feature, routing people to a separate space creates a parallel process. That flow is not consistent with the user experience we want to create.
- Using a single event instance to tell people about a series of events us also confusing, and it's usually ineffective in letting people know that the series is ongoing. The initial event announcement will disappear from view after the first instance. Anybody who comes to look for events in their area after that initial series announcement disappears won't be able to see that the event descriptor for the initial date mentioned other dates. If you want Wrimos to know about every event in a series, please post each instance as a discrete event.
We also have other considerations: as a nonprofit we have to be in a position to measure the impact of our platform (for reporting purposes to our funders). The way some folks are currently advertising their events and asking people to RSVP outside of our site hinders our ability to understand the true number of writers we are serving.
We really are fine with folks doing their own thing. Our primary hope is that writers find community and keep writing. We don't view ourselves in competition with other entities and we have strong relationships with other organizations that do what we do, even organizations that compete for the same grant funding. But as a nonprofit beholden to serving our mission and to using our donated funds to support our programs, we can't place ourselves in a position to use our limited time and resources toward explaining outside efforts. We ask that people only use events pages for their intended purpose: to notify writers about the details of individual events. Our spaces, and our resources, have to align to our model for running our programs.