[Devel] Request for feedback: Adding a calendar to the site, as per release goals

[Asheesh Laroia]

I've come to really like events. I think that the OpenHatch site has an 
opportunity to highlight how people can join communities just by showing 
up -- not just in terms of bugs and tasks.

I think that OpenHatch should add a calendar to the site and, over time, 
make it a core part of the site. We can aggregate events that other 
projects are already running. I also think it will provide the kind of 
dynamic content that will bring people back to the OpenHatch site and help 
them learn about the other tools on the site.

We did come to some consensus on that during the release planning process 
two meetings ago, but not everyone was there, so I want to make sure 
everyone gets a chance to chime in if they want.

Executive summary
-----------------

I want to make that calendar part of our site. I think we should do it by 
hosting our own version of Calagator, a free-sotware, Rails-based calendar 
aggregation program. I want to have basic integration with the site (like 
having calendar events show up on the front page), and start importing 
calendar events from various sources as a release goal for July.

I want to limit our calendar to just contain inexpensive or free events 
that are useful for people looking to get involved in open source. We're 
going to need a policy on exactly what events those are; I'll try to write 
that up separately.

I'm sending this email to get discussion going and reach consensus. If 
people don't give feedback within a few days I'm going to energetically 
start filing bugs for my plan, and then resolving them!

Goals of the calendar
---------------------

* Make it easy for newcomers to open source to hang out, in-person or 
on-line, with current contributors

* Encourage project maintainers to run events targeted at newcomers

Requirements
------------

* It should be possible to add events from within the web UI

* It should be possible to import events from calendar feeds like 
meetup.com streams

* It should be easy to subscribe to an OpenHatch events feed with your 
favorite calendar app (e.g. Google Calendar, Evolution, iCal)

* Login must be integrated with the main OpenHatch site

* The calendar should look good, like everything of ours (-:

* OpenHatch admins can exercise editorial control over events.

Why I like Calagator
--------------------

Calagator is a calendar used to track technology user group meetings in 
the Portland, Oregon, area. You can see it on the web: 
http://calagator.org/

Calagor has a lot going for it:

* it's free software, and it's maintained by a pretty active community.

* it already has a *great deal* of import and export code for calendar 
events.

* We wouldn't have to write the code to do calendaring, much at all

The thing I like the most about Calagator, honestly, is that we wouldn't 
have to write any code. We could treat it like any other app, like the 
forum or the wiki, that we install that's in a different language. We'll 
have to implement login integration, and maybe file some bugs against it, 
but I'm particularly enthused because I know it has an active community.

Downsides to installing Calagator
---------------------------------

It would be one more external app to maintain. It's in Ruby and Rails, 
which I am no expert in.

(However, our friends jledbetter and tehviking from IRC might de-lurk and 
pay attention and help out since it's Rails, and they're Rails fans.)

Compared to writing our own calendar, this makes it harder to get a 
hackable version of the calendar to submit patches against. But I plan to 
address that with Vagrant -- I can put a Calagator instance into the 
virtual OpenHatch site that you get with the VM.

Next steps
----------

If you read this far -- thank you!

My questions:

* Would you visit http://calagator.org/ and tell me if you think it would 
work for us?

* Are there requirements I'm missing?

* Can you propose another technology (for example, something written in 
Django) that would work just as well?

I'd like to set a pretty quick timeline for getting this going, and I'm 
willing to take on the job of doing the initial deployment and login 
integration work, if necessary, to make sure that happens.

-- Asheesh.