Improving visibility of SIGs

[taras]

Motivation

In the Adoption SIG on August 31, 2023, we discussed the need for a more streamlined process for managing the Backstage community calendar. The current process requires manual intervention, which results in events missing from the calendar until the last minute. This was not an issue in the past because we only had one SIG, which was not recorded. Now, we have two SIGs and two working groups. Each event is recorded, but accessing the videos isn't always easy. We want to find an easier way to manage the calendar. This issue aims to give us a place to capture available options.

Here is a list of considerations that we need to be aware of when considering a solution:

• SIGs and Working Group meetings should show up on one calendar.
• We need to update events in Discord automatically.
• Community members should be able to contribute to the calendar, but we need some governance to ensure that only events for SIGs & WG are created.
• It would be nice if people could opt in to be notified of community events.
• Ideally, the meetings would be automatically recorded, transcribed, and available to the community for viewing.

Desired Outcomes:

• Establishment of a canonical source of truth for community events/information
• Others? (leave a comment)

Approach

Nothing is settled yet; here are some of the options that we found:

CNCF Tools

CNCF has some tools for managing community calendars. Some of the other sandbox projects use these tools. Craig Tracey connected us with Jorge Castro from Linux Foundation, who has some bandwidth to help us navigate CNCF options. Jorge agreed to share their solutions in comments to this issue.

Other options?

Are there other options that we should consider? Please share them in comments.

[craigtracey]

While this list of considerations is great, I believe that another worthwhile goal would be the establishment of a canonical source of truth for community events/information. Perhaps it lives in git (here?) or elsewhere, but hopefully it serves as a place to go should any of the other mechanisms fail/be unknown to an adopter.

I also want to emphasize the "SIGs and Working Group meetings" bullet point. As it stands today, SIGs are relatively easy to discover, but working group meetings are significantly harder...usually amounting to searching Discord.

[taras]

I'll add "establishment of a canonical source of truth for community events/information" to the list of outcomes.

[castrojo]

I'd be happy to help Backstage with this! I'm information gathering at this point on calendar options and then whatever issues are brought up in this thread.

[taras]

Let us know what further information will be helpful to you.