Discuss how communities can lean on civictech.guide calendar

[patcon]

Right now, Civic Tech Toronto keeps a community Google calendar. We have a bot that allows it to be crowd-maintained, though some people add more to it than others:

Our chatbot command where anyone can type roobot gcal add http://eventbrite.com/myevent, and the bot uses a little hosted service to get event metadata from the page, and create an event. I know that quite a few people subscribe to the gcal, but no exact analytics, unfortunately.

• https://github.com/CivicTechTO/event-metadata-parser
• https://github.com/CivicTechTO/hubot-toby/blob/master/scripts/calendar-add.coffee
• http://civictech.ca/calendar/

Anyhow, I see that Civic Hall is maintaining a calendar for the field guide. This is great, but I was wondering if anyone is interested in riffing on how this could be democratized a bit. Perhaps we could allow people to submit their community calendars (which they manage however they please), and we could host a service that can merge many ical feeds into one (perhaps even letting people choose which).

Related: https://github.com/jacobmischka/ics-merger

So why do this? For me, the end-goal would be to have a source from which to generate announcements i my home slack. I feel like working toward this -- a shared resource that we build together, and which meets us each where we already hang out -- would be beneficial. Eventually offering a little announcement chatbot service would be huge for keeping us all in sync -- after all, getting together in-person for events is where all the connection magic truly happens :)

[mstem]

Thanks for writing this up. It sounds like a very handy service, and Ill check out the CivicTechTO repos and calendar. My initial reaction is that the community calendars I have subscribed to in the past quickly get inundated with less relevant events, up until the day I hide them from my calendar view and forget they exist. Our goal with our calendars is to provide two clear, well defined event streams —

1. major, international civic tech conferences (versus location specific events)
2. funding, fellowship, and other opportunity deadlines that might appeal to a number of people

We maintain two separate calendars to keep these streams fresh and clean for people. Anyone can add to either calendar by inviting info@civictech.guide to an event, or emailing the event. We welcome submissions but need to play a curatorial role to keep the signal to noise ratio in check.