Timezone Visualisation

Timezone Visualisation
0
#1

Hey, I created a little javascript widget to visualise each of our working days against eachother.

I can add more people, but have included a few examples.

Just wondering where to put this? Ideas? Hate it?:

image

NB It sorts, with people sent to the top who are closest to their midday.

White is local midday, black is out of hours. The red marks current time.

The numbers are based on GMT. These could just as easily be hidden as are meaningless for most.

It’s very approximate and uses a sine wave raised to the power to create the ‘heat map’.

It’s pure javascript (w/ HTML and CSS) at the moment with hard coding and not integrated with Groups and Users, but could be, e.g. fixed banner widget that shows all users in Group x.

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#2

That’s cool @merefield nice work! There’s a discourse-international-team-collab-plugin in there somewhere!

Weird that time difference is so hard to perceive without aids though isn’t it? Especially when more than one time zone in play - we have 4 (so far!) and it’s pretty difficult to find a time that is remotely civilised for everyone.

What’s even weirder is the hours some of us keep… so actually even though the clock says ‘out of hours’, that is often the best coding time, nobody ‘local’ bothers you and there’s less cortisol flying about… Maybe a graph of that would bring some insights too

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#3

Yeah, I was gonna say, we both just broke the widget :smiley:

#4

It’s definitely one for Ideas. This has huge potential. Like Doodle but for timezones, integrated into Discourse.

1 Like
#5

Whoa! I love this… hmm… have you seen that mailchimp has a tool to help scheduling mailers, and sends them at the optimal time for each recipient? They must have some clever way to calculate that based on when people are opening their mailings historically.

Maybe a similar thing could be figured out here - it may be a bit invasive, but why not have a visualization of when during the day people tend to be active, based on historical data, alongside when they say they are active? Perhaps this can be a complement to the who’s online plugin and provide some public facing interfaces e.g. on user cards and user profile pages.

Participating in either could be toggled via a personal setting. And with visibility perhaps limitable to groups?

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#6

I was really impressed with the OP and was thinking of the next simple step, eg how useful it would be to be able to ‘Show My Local Time’ on my user card or something. Just something that makes it easy for people to see what time zone I am in and if it’s the middle of the night for me locally.

Admittedly we all work at weird hours so a plugin that looks at historical activity averages might be more useful, but harder and more invasive to implement. Whereas ‘Show my local time on my user card’ isn’t all that invasive and is quite a lot easier to do.

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#7

Wow, that’s cool :slight_smile:

Good idea. That could easily be bundled as the same Component.

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#8

My goodness, what a co-incidence!:

btw, I’ve added the codepen to the OP.

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#9

Will we be installing this on thePavilion.io?

1 Like