Hacker News Reader

Comment by jarofgreen | Hacker News Reader

Hello, I'm the founder of https://opentechcalendar.co.uk/ mentioned in the events tab.

We are a open site listing tech events around Scotland. Open means anyone can add an event, like a wiki. We can import data from suitable open sources, and most importantly we have many Open Data feeds. Our data is reused many times by many different people and sites.

We are about to celebrate our 4th birthday, and are the main listings site in Scotland. There is a great community around, and we are proud to be part of that (we are based in Edinburgh). Our software is Open Source to!

Give me a shout if any questions, Thanks, James

View on HN

Awesome work. Down here in England we have something very similar - https://www.techdiary.co.uk - it might be worthwhile reaching out to that site for some sort of data sharing arrangement, especially for the London events.

Think I've seen that before - I'll check and reach out. Always happy to chat - email hello at the website.

We're not just Scotland, we have a lot of events listed in Sheffield to.

It's an interesting one - looking at the site, we have more tech features in terms of working with events data. One of the big things we do that we haven't seen many others do is have a system where anyone with a user account can add and edit data directly. We think this is very important - if only one or a few ppl can work on events the burden on them to make sure it's kept up to date becomes very big. If this burden is spread over many editors, then "many hands make light work". (We also have several other tricks to make sure our data is kept up to date!)

That said tho, for a community site like this the community is more important! It's very interesting to see the variety of approaches that are taken. If people from an area want to talk about using Open Tech Calendar in their area or have feedback, do get in touch.

You only have two upcoming events in Manchester, so it's probably worth pointing out this http://technw.uk/calendar for the north west.

Thanks! I've talked to a lot of people in Manchester, it has a very interesting scene.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com