Community calendar (was: Re: Software Freedom Day)

[Dave Neary <dneary free fr>]

Hi,

Thilo Pfennig wrote:
> This sounds like a good task for marketing crew. We could make a list on
> a wiki page where people can add events, too. The somebody could send a
> list of upcoming events to some lists like marketing and the foundation
> board some weeks before an event so there would be enough time to veto
> and/or prepair things.

This is another opportunity for me to pimp the GNOME community calendar
I've been maintaining for at least 18 months ;)

http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/mdnrfqhbsjn37b6sgad089qmak%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

There are currently 15 or so people who can add events to the calendar
and I will add anyone who asks (on condition that I know them at least
by name - I don't want it to grow spam). The list currently includes:

Dave Neary
Anne Oestergaard
Glynn Foster
Jeff Waugh
Quim Gil
Rosanna Yuen
Behdad Esfahbod
Vincent Untz
Kevin Harriss
Patrick Wagstrom
Sriram Ramkrishna
Eitan Isaacson
Jonh Wendell
Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay

I'd be happy to add yourself and Claus to that list, as well as people
from other GNOME user groups worldwide.

> Do you think adding more general events would be finde.

I have been adding the following types of events:

* Events organised or collaborating with the GNOME Foundation
* Events where GNOME community members are giving presentations
* Events where GNOME user groups are managing stands
* Events of general interest to the GNOME community

> This list should contain worldwide events that
> GNOME supports wholeheartedly and likes its users to know about or maybe
> use as a local action. This would/could be:
> 
> * Software Freedom Day
> * Stop Software Patents world Day (which is today)
> * Document Freedom Day (promotes open document standards, which is what
> GNOME also supports I guess)
> * Anniversaries of GNOME, GNU, Linux kernel, X11, ...
> * New GNOME releases, thats already happening. Maybe we could add a
> countdown like "Only XX days till the release of GNOME 2.24" ?
> * I would also consider releases of distros to be mentioned as this
> means that GNOME users get a new GNOME (much more than the release of a
> new GNOME does). So one could announce like: "A new Ubuntu is out. With
> that Ubuntu users get the new GNOME 2.24", same for Fedora and others.

I'm happy to share the burden.

Of these, I hadn't heard of software patents day or document freedom
day, I hadn't been following software freedom day closely, the
anniversaries seem a little contrived if I may say so, but why not; new
GNOME releases should have already been there (it seems I forgot to add
them for 2.23.*, sorry for the oversight), and if we can know release
dates of distros shipping GNOME in advance, why not? I see the calendar
as a forward-looking tool, rather than a historical document, so I'd be
against wasting time adding past events to the calendar.

> BTW - maybe we could have a simple solution for www.gnome.org also that
> includes a kind calendar . If wgo would have a space for something like
> announcement banners and one could plan what is in that banner - one
> could work very early  on what will appear. Those banners could also
> like to live.gnome.org/DocumentFreedomDay which again could explain what
> that is and how GNOME users can get involved.

It is possible to generate an agenda from a Google calendar, and
generate an RSS feed from that.

The best I have been able to find, unfortunately, is the XML version of
the feed, which sorts entries (undesirably) by the date they're added to
the calendar, rather than by the start date of the events.

http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/mdnrfqhbsjn37b6sgad089qmak%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic

> I could create this page - everybody could review - and I also could
> send a list of events  to this list. Those could be discussed here also
> and maybe adding those to the calendar would also be a nice idea. For
> local events I would suggest that the national GNOME organizations do
> such stuff - so like Linuxtag in Germany is something the german team
> should work on.

It'd be nice to have a live updated feed in the sidebar that included
all events, ordered by start date, whose end date is on or after today.
No idea how that might be done, just wanted to throw that out there :)

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
dneary free fr
Tel: +33 9 51 13 46 45
Cell: +33 6 77 01 92 13