Information Curation Evolution
I toatally forgot to mention an important development in my 2016 season summary post! The evolution of my annual rides list!
Every winter, when there’s lots of desire to ride but little-to-no riding happening, one of the things that helps me cope is planning-or is it fantasizing?-about the season ahead: where I’ll ride, how far I’ll ride, and-most importantly-which major events I’ll participate in.
Major events like charity rides and centuries are an easy way to set goals for the year, and to structure your training plan.
Knowing which events you’ll commit to also lets you plan the logistics of making them happen. You not only want to set those dates aside on your calendar, but you might need to reserve transportation or a hotel room, or plan your charity fundraising effort.
Naturally, the dead of winter is an ideal time to make a list of the rides you want to do. Back in Boston, I had no problem making my list, because after fifteen years of riding, I already knew all the big organized rides. But when I moved to Pittsburgh, I first had to discover what rides were available to me.
But that wasn’t very easy. I found numerous organizations with ride calendars, but none of them were very useful. Some clubs had blank calendars that they didn’t maintain. Other clubs listed their own rides, but no one else’s. And surprisingly worst of all were the groups who tried to aggregate every ride known to man into one big munge that was both unreadable and hard to navigate!
When I looked at those sites-especially the aggregate calendars-the contrast with my succinct, regular one-page annual summary was stark. The information was out there, but it needed to be presented in a more reader-friendly way. In short, it was time to put on my information design hat.
The first task of an information designer is to understand what information the end-user needs, because everything else follows from that. In this instance, the intended audience is myself, which made it easy to just interview myself to find out what I really wanted!
Ironically, the criteria for including a ride isn’t very quantifiable. I wanted major rides that were “serious” and “nontrivial”. But what does any of that mean?
One way to define “major” is simply by distance. There are a lot of short rides, but you usually don’t plan your year around them. You could pick an arbitrary minimum length, like 50 miles, but that’s not perfect, because you might still make exceptions for some shorter rides.
Another way is repetition. Obviously, if a ride happens every week, it’s probably not a big deal if you miss any particular one. Whereas you might not want to miss a ride that takes place only once a year. But that’s not great either, because Pittsburgh has lots of little social rides which take place annually that you wouldn’t structure your season around.
Another obvious thing to think about is rides that require pre-registration, or which might fill up or sell out if you don’t reserve a spot early. You’d definitely want to note a ride like that in your calendar.
And anything that’s a significant event, where there will be lots of riders or people you want to see or some other significant reason to be there. But what’s “significant”? Again, it’s subjective.
Ultimately, the criteria I use for including a ride on my list is whether it’s something I-or some other serious rider-would want to plan one’s season around, for whatever reason. Still vague and subjective, but it’s what seems to work for me.
In the past, I’ve usually kept my list of events for the season on a single sheet of paper, either in a chronological list or in a compressed year-at-a-glance calendar, like you see at left.
Last year, while composing my first Pittsburgh-area list, I posted a copy to the BikePGH message board in order to get feedback from other local riders. They pointed out several rides I’d missed, but they also suggested I share it by publishing it online.
So after some updates, I announced my creation of the Annual Rides Calendar, hosted on the BikingPGH wiki.
I’m very pleased with the result. The whole regional cycling calendar is distilled down to the absolute essentials, listing no more than six to eight serious rides per month, max, with links directly to the rides’ websites. It’s easy to scan by date in order to see both what’s coming up soon as well as a whole-season overview, without being cluttered to death with every little weekly ride across every neighborhood in Western Pennsylvania.
This new format calendar was useful last year, and the exercise of making it helped me gain familiarity with the big rides that take place here. Some other local cyclists have praised its usefulness, and I’m very pleased with it.
And now that the new year has begun, I’ve updated the Annual Rides Calendar for 2017!