Eventplease Aims to Centralize Harvard Calendars Online

The Undergraduate Council voted on Monday to adopt a new event calendar website, Eventplease, as its platform for announcing upcoming events.

After a semester offline, Eventplease—a website created by students to centralize Harvard’s events and calendars—recently rebooted with a better interface. UC representatives said that their endorsement was a result of the website’s student-friendly design and easy-to-use system.

“We’ve had calendars in the past that listed a lot of events that students didn’t really care about,” said UC secretary Michael C. George ’14, who is also a Crimson news editor. “Eventplease really focuses on events that undergraduates would be interested in, which is why the UC has chosen to help the website get off the ground with publicity, endorsement, and manpower.”

Together with former UC Vice President Bonnie Cao ’12, George spearheaded the UC’s decision to bring back Eventplease. A message will be sent to the entire student body Friday to introduce the website.

UC representatives are currently in the process of informing student leaders and organizations about Eventplease so that they can begin using the website.

“In ten seconds, you can get your event publicized to over a thousand people,” said George. “There’s no reason students wouldn’t want to use Eventplease.”

With the integration of Facebook, Google calendar, and iCal, Eventplease is the first website at Harvard that allows students to track an event and see how many other people are planning to attend.

Unlike the Harvard Events Calendar and the Harvard Gazette Calendar, Eventplease allows any student registered on Facebook’s Harvard network to create a Facebook event when they post on the website.

“Eventplease has a very sophisticated interface,” co-creator Michael B. Wong ’12 said. “Not only can students navigate through events more easily, but a built-in reputation system can also track your preferences and recommend events that you might like.”

Eventplease, which currently has 1,129 people and 242 organizations registered, is one of several recent attempts to improve communication about ongoing campus events. Previous initiatives include HarvardEvents, a CS50 calendar application created by Computer Science Senior Lecturer David J. Malan ’99, and HarvardTonight, a subreddit for finding parties created by Yasha S. Iravantchi ’13 and Ryan A. Neff ’13.

At the start of the spring semester, Simon M. Thompson ’14 also launched Crimson Events, which sent out an email with the top events every day. Though 300 students signed up for Crimson Events, Thompson chose to discontinue the mailing list and endorse Eventplease, after the website adopted an email feature that was absent before.

“I’m enthusiastic about Eventplease. It does everything that all other initiatives have tried in the past,” he said.

Eventplease first launched last April, when the UC unanimously passed legislation to endorse the website. At the time, Eventplease had around 100 events listed and was getting a maximum of 400 hits per day. Wong took the website offline so that he and his three co-creators could improve the system.

“We got a lot of feedback when students first started using Eventplease,” Wong said. “We wanted to work out all the kinks and figure out how to sustain traffic so that students could use it continuously.”

—Staff writer Michelle Denise L. Ferreol can be reached at mferreol@college.harvard.edu.