[Events] Thoughts about a future events.openhatch.org

[Asheesh Laroia]

Right now, events.openhatch.org is an events calendar that shows events that
we think visitors to the OpenHatch site website might care about. (Actually,
it looks like an empty calendar. There were a few events posted in the past
2 months: http://events.openhatch.org/events?date%5Bstart%5D=2010-10-31&date%5Bend%5D=2012-01-31&commit=Filter )

Proposal
--------

I think that our calgator install is not serving the intended purpose. I propose
that we:

* Turn events.openhatch.org into a mostly-static set of information pages
  about our different events and why we've done them, and try to help people
  follow in our footsteps with similar events.

* Post events not on our own website, but instead on grical.org, and take some
  measures (e.g. cron job?) to back up the data so if they go away we can
  re-host it elsewhere.

* Stop running our own Calagator.

This is based on consensus reached between aldeka (Karen), pythonian4000
(Jack), and paulproteus (Asheesh) at the last weekly meeting, PLUS my own
looking at grical.org and thinking it's awesome.

Our Calagator: good and bad
---------------------------

If you take a look at it http://events.openhatch.org/ , you might notice
some of the following problems:

* It doesn't support repeating events. There's a spec in upstream's wiki,
  so it might be done sometime, but it hasn't been a priority so far.

* We have to run it ourselves. (Not a show-stopper, but worth considering the
  cost of this.)

At the risk of repeating myself, here is why we spend time maintaining a
calendar:

* We want to help all people who want to be friendly and helpful discover
  communities like WordPress through their normal community meetings.

http://events.openhatch.org/events/6 is an example of such a weekly meeting.

Information about these weekly meetings is spread across the web, hidden in
blog posts and wiki pages, which make these community events hard to find.
It would be great if we could integrate this data with our project pages
like http://openhatch.org/+projects/WordPress .

The real service of what we're doing is in getting the data into the open,
independent of if we host it.

The importance of explaining our events
---------------------------------------

As OpenHatch moves into having the web tools *plus* spending a bunch of time
on events -- and indeed the events make us famous faster than the web tools
-- it's important that we have a space to write about what they are and why we
do them.

This is especially important for things like "Starling Bounties" where other
people can be inspired by us and run one for their project.

Proposing a leaner events.openhatch.org
---------------------------------------

Right now, we have a wiki page listing the Events we've put together:

https://openhatch.org/wiki/Events

I think events.openhatch.org should basically be in the spirit of that, but
explaining more about what each event is, and why we do/did it, plus a link
to more info. From the last IRC meeting:

21:21:54 <paulproteus> I propose events.oh.o is not just a list of 
upcoming events, but instead an index of our "product list" events-wise. 
21:22:42 <paulproteus> And yeah, it should promote them, not just link, 
but it doesn't have to be a super long description for each one.
21:22:46 <paulproteus> But a non-minimal one.

Sadness
-------

We've had some nice contributions to our Calagator from two people in particular,
Clara and Chris Sims, and it'd be sad to drop their work on the floor.

Also, I think that going to grical would be a step backward in time zone support.
I think that's okay, but if it's a showstopper, people are welcome to tell me
that I should get a patch merged to GriCal first that makes it show data in a
user's time zone.

Also if we host events on grical.org we may lose some branding credit. I 
think that if we tag the events appropriately, that won't be a big deal.

-- Asheessh.