Contents
About
This page is about software and a potential service for aggregating details of social events, meetings and conferences from different sources. The DebianEvents page provides details about specific events in the Debian community.
Why?
There are already a number of calendar sites, why is something more useful?
- aggregating a larger amount of data into a single database while allowing users to focus on the events most meaningful to them
- helping people discover new events that they would never have discovered through their existing communities
- helping leaders in the community take the free software message to more generic events and reach a wider audience
- helping people identify events that fit with their travel plans or goals
- promoting cultural exchange
- helping GSoC and Outreachy interns find meaningful events they can attend without losing a week of their project on visa bureaucracy
Sources of data about events
- Debian
- pages listed on the Debian wiki:
page DebianEvents
tagged with CategoryEvents
listed by LocalGroups
the mailing lists debian-events-eu, debian-events-apac, debian-events-na, debian-br-eventos
- pages listed on the Debian wiki:
- Outside Debian
FLOSS Events: ics
CCC: upcoming events, dates pad, events pad
OpenEventDatabase a collaborative database for all events (cultural, entertainment, earthquake, traffic_jam, weather, sport exhibition…) with OSM tags philosophy (talk at SotM 2016, example for an event in Paris); query and contribution frontends to be developed.
- sites/services that focus on events
- other sites with structured data about events
- web search queries for finding events
- web site/CMS software capabilities for events
Discourse forum - search for plugins related to iCalendar
Drupal CMS - search for plugins related to iCalendar
MoinMoin, the wiki engine used for this site, also used for FSFE's events
Wordpress CMS - search for plugins related to iCalendar
MediaWiki - LibrePlanet events
- Full system
Useful attributes for events
Attribute |
Details |
Location |
|
Call for papers deadline |
|
Registration deadline |
|
Bursary deadline |
|
Type of bursary offered |
e.g. general, diversity, speaker, volunteer, ... |
Code of Conduct |
|
Accessibility |
|
Entrance fees |
|
Booths/table/exhibition space exists |
|
Booths/table/exhibition space deadline |
|
Streaming URL |
|
Post-event video archive URL |
|
URL of detailed event calendar (list of talks, workshops) |
|
Scraping data about events
What tools exist for scraping event data from sites like Meetup and Facebook?
I had seen this: https://github.com/Psycojoker/wanawana
Facepy - Python/Django to interact with the Facebook API
Python Facebook Bot - Perhaps this might work if the query parameters are changed to search events by description instead of location.
Search Facebook events by location (as a service) - This is the same as the above, needs to change the querying. It's an Express.js implementation that works with Docker.
Are there browser plugins for this purpose?
Are there web crawlers that can do this?
Are there web crawlers for finding events through search engines?
How can third parties annotate event data?
Assuming that some sites don't provide a mechanism for third-parties to edit or improve their data, complementary systems can be developed to store meta-data submitted by third parties unrelated to the event organizer.
- Reviews of events
- Tagging events
- Recommending events
- Suggested third party bursaries
Outputs from the event data aggregation project
- Building a database of aggregated event data
- Web site for querying an events database
- (personalized) iCalendar feeds with events
(personalized) iCalendar feeds with CfP, bursary and booth deadlines as VTODO items
- Making shortlists of events (e.g. 10 biggest free software events in Europe, 10 best free software events for job seekers)
Making it happen
Potential work items for volunteers
- Improving this wiki page
- Data sources
- Reviewing the CMS plugins to find out which is best
- Extending the CMS plugins to support more structured data (e.g. a field for bursary deadline)
- Writing new CMS plugins (e.g. for Discourse, it doesn't appear to have a plugin yet)
- Writing web crawlers or scraping tools to extract event data from other sites and transform it into iCalendar files
- Helping communities add the plugins to their web sites and start using them effectively
Others
Proposal pelican-based Debian Event website
Generating a website with Debian related events. Fill a markdown file and get the event announced on a website.