View this page "Tech Calendars to Aggregate"

[Joe Cohen]

I've added all the calendars recently mentioned to this page so that
there's a single page that lists them all.

Click on http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-tech-calendar/web/tech-calendars-to-aggregate
- or copy & paste it into your browser's address bar if that doesn't
work.

[aziari]

I added Oregon Investment Fund. We hold events several times a year
appealing to the tech community.

[Ryan]

Added Portland Web Innovators, SAO, and PADNUG

Click on http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-tech-calendar/web/tech-calendars-to-aggregate?hl=en

[Jeff Schwaber]

As this keeps happening, the Google Calendar format starts appealing
less and less. It's not that Google is doing a bad job of it, it's
that the format we want is less calendarish and more blogish: with too
many events, it's easy to turn them all off. With fewer, more spaced
out, +blurb event announcements people are more likely to be
interested.

In fact, I'm not convinced that the best way isn't rss-based.

Each group doing events has a blog (probably -- if not, encourage them
to. those who won't and you want to aggregate their events, blog for
them). Add a tag like aggregatethis to entries that are upcoming event
announcements.

Have a blog aggregator that filters for that tag and goes through a
set list of blogs.

It won't generate a calendar, but I'm not convinced the use case for a
calendar of hundreds of events per month is really much there. Too
much competition, too little distinguishment.

Jeff

[Steve Morris]

I have the "too many events" problem with the OregonStartup.com
calendar. So for my newsletter, I use a Google API feed and a php
script to output a simple text format (you can view it at http://www.oregonstartups.com/event-list.php.)

What would be nice is this kind of a format (which is more like a very
terse blog format) but with the added option of filtering for keywords
you're interested in. I just haven't taken the time to do the keyword
part yet...

On the other hand, a calendar event form is a handy way to capture
event info in a reasonably structured way (so there's always a date,
time, etc.) which you wouldn't necessarily always get with an
unstructured blog input.

Steve

[Anselm Hook]

The rss and aggregation format is pretty appealing because it's less of a single point of failure...

It's actually a really really interesting problem because isn't this kind of something everybody on the planet wants?

I personally favor and would like to suggest that as well as ical that also a brute force parsing of the raw rss text is considered - possibly as an additional add-on.

This involves scanning for special reserved keywords or patterns such as "on tuesday january 7th" or the like; with enough of a feedback loop so that people that post events to their blog can see if the aggregator is picking up the salient details.

The reason I prefer that approach is that we've got to start treating these machines like intelligent agents, where they are facilitating ordinary discourse; rather than having to freight around all of the incredibly clumsy form interfaces, database schemas, standards for transport of schematic representation of dates and times and locations ...  And they're perfectly capable of doing it at this point.  There's a twitter mapping application for example that scans twitter messages for loc: tokens where you can say loc:PDX or loc:94110 and it can map those twitter posts...  This is a reasonable compromise; a machine CAN deal with this.

That isn't to say that such an aggregator shouldn't also catch ical or whatever; I'm just saying that it's worth it to also { as a second step } push beyond that and let people simply "speak" and be able to capture a broader spectrum of sources than just people who can publish ical.

I notice as well that clearly such a PDX Calendar would basically be totally packed with events every single day...  while tending to favor the "get something running" approach; it's a question of how filtering could be done against it.

Anyway; this is just a great and fascinating problem; it's a real social issue; and it's something that for some reason is just not done well as far as I can see.  Clearly somebody could even build a business empire around such a trivial app if they were commercially minded.

In any case... it would be worthwhile to either find the off the shelf solution or to knock together something small that services the need and then extend it...

My own sense is that some of us will probably report back with some prototypes - and/or we'll get together at this upcoming codeathon thing that Audrey mentioned and do it there...  so I'm totally looking forward to that.

 - a

[Joe Cohen]

Added some more groups, with links to either a calendar or to the
groups page. Ran out of time -- lots more to add.

Click on http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-tech-calendar/web/tech-calendars-to-aggregate

[Joe Cohen]

Added more groups (mostly from the excellent list hand-compiled by
TakKendrick and others at AboutUs, see http://www.aboutus.org/PortlandTech/Reoccurring_Calendar)
Added a link for each group
Removed duplicates

At some point this should be put into a sortable table (or database)
with fields like: FullName, FullNameWithoutPortland, Abbreviation,
AbbreviationWithoutPortland, GroupSite, GroupEventPage, GroupCalendar,
CalendarFormat (hcal, ical, html_consistent_format,
html_inconsistent_format).

Click on http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-tech-calendar/web/tech-calendars-to-aggregate?hl=en

[Joe Cohen]

I completed the migration of the calendar list to the spreadsheet
located at http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pChl5a7IzmClfjuh4YxgOCQ

Please add any new calendars to the spreadsheet. Please also add
information about the calendar formats to the spreadsheet.

Click on http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-tech-calendar/web/tech-calendars-to-aggregate