I’m trying this discourse thing out, and right now I wish there was a category for “Calendar of upcoming events.” At the very least, I’d like a calendar that shows the major scheduled events (Summit, Congress, NDOCH, NAC meetings) in one place and as soon as the dates are determined, even if no other details are known.
Maybe later if there was a way to have a calendar with filters by region or city, that was maybe fed by Meetup, where we could see when other brigades are having events.
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Hey @janmic that’s a great idea. Have you seen the Events page on the Brigade website?
http://brigade.codeforamerica.org/events
We designed that page to give brigade leaders information about network-wide events that they can participate in. It’s somewhat narrowly tailored right now (it excludes NAC meetings, in-person events like Demo Nights, since those events aren’t generally open to the entire network).
I’m curious what your impressions of that page are as compared to what you’re thinking about for the forum page.
There are some awesome event plugins for Discourse like this one: https://meta.discourse.org/t/events-plugin-calendar/69776
But alas, we’re not going to be able to install any custom plugins on this forum since we’re using the official hosting
@tdooner what we’re missing in the network right now is a ground-up way to share events, i.e. major events brigades are hosting that members of other brigades might be interested in. A Teamup calendar or Discourse events board could be good for that.
As far as the major scheduled events @janmic was looking for though, the brigade site’s event page definitely gets the job done.
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As you say, the NAC schedule isn’t on the Brigade/events page, and even though the dates for Congress are known, that page still only says “October” and “more details coming soon.”
(this could just be a personal problem with me having too many calendars!)
I guess I’m just trying to tease apart the use case here so we can design a communication process that works effectively. There are many use cases possible here:
- Helping NAC keep track of all their/your meetings
- Helping Brigade leaders find out about opportunities to engage the national network
- Helping frequent travelers (like @chris
) have a single place with all the brigade meetings
For example, if we make a calendar targeted at Brigade leaders, but include NAC meetings on it, it gets confusing because as of now the NAC meetings are closed.
I don’t think there’s much value to having a single place for all brigade meetings, we’ve set that up before by aggregating all the meetups and it seems like just a lot of noise. If I’m traveling to a city I can just check out their local site for when the regular local events are, I know where I’m going I don’t need to see them all in one place.
It would be good to have some sort of shared brigade network calendar that brigades could publish the events they want to share to. It needs to be an extra step though so there’s an element of curation. For example, Code for Philly would publish our demo day there so members of other brigades could tune in. If we just dumped an automatic feed of all our weekly hack nights, whatever channel they feed into would become worthless for getting the word out about special events we really want the network to see.
The events plugin for Discourse is awesome, but given we’re currently running this forum on a hosted instance, we don’t have the ability to install plugins…
I’d be interested in calculating the cloud deployment costs of our own instance so we could make this more robust. Just a few of the things Discourse supports with plugins:
- Event listings
- Chat boxes
- Slack integration
- Kanban/Trello-like boards
- ‘Who’s Online’
- Locations
- Polls
- Q&A Sessions
- Convert topics into questions that can be marked as solved
- Google forms native integration
- Embedding topics into other sites
- dozens more!
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@carlvlewis we’ve got all the basic plugins officially maintained by Discourse.
Re: calculating the cloud deployment costs, that wouldn’t be too tough, but the bigger concern addressed by the donated hosting is that we don’t have to keep it updated or maintain institutional knowledge of how to administer it. IMO that’s not worth giving up (at least not until it grows into an ultra-critical part of the community)
I’d be a fan of a teamup calendar that any brigade organizer can add events to and include links to forum topics for details/discussion if desired
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Hey! Resurfacing this thread to note that now that our plan got bumped up a few months ago, we have the events plugin. So what we have now is:
Events Calendar | Code for America Brigade - This can/will be edited in the next week but the basics are going to stay largely the same, especially the Google cal embed.
Here’s a sample calendar page I created in Discourse - it’s a little better that Gcal in my opinion, but I’m not seeing “import” options, and am unsure about syncing or setting up an automation with Zapier + Gcal + Discourse. The ideal scenario would be to allow for both a Gcal and a Discourse calendar. Curious if others have thoughts/ ideas on the ideal scenario given this.
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Hi hello! I just wanted to share that this calendar feature is now working / functional & just launched: Code for America Network
When you create a post (it has to be a new topic aka the first post in a series), you can hit the little gear button and hit “create event.” Insert relevant details, and it’ll show up on this calendar. Let’s take it for a spin! I’m continuing to backfill & add existing events now. (@janmic @chris )
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Great thread! I am a ReVisioning team member who has held many conversations throughout the process and currently do. A calendar has been an ask repeated by many. To go a step further, many echoed the thought of a " To Go To" quick reference page as well. Included would be links to our Code of Conduct, Project Index, Brigades, Programs etc… Nothing with alot of verbiage, just quick links along with the month at a glance. If collaboration between Brigades are being encouraged, then maybe when hitting on a specific day all brigade meetings for that day are listed. I like the calendars shown thus far and especially appreciate the thought of linking it to an exiting personal calendar. Which may work better if one were to choose which events they would like listed on a regular basis.
I am not seeing the “Create Event” option when I click the gear of a new topic. Here is a screenshot of my attempting to access this feature:
Am I doing something wrong?
Hopefully it’s easier to create on a laptop. Not user friendly for mobile.
I agree a simple place to wayfind our way around existing resources would be super helpful. @elb is currently working on a notion instance that should do that.Though my preference would be the Brigade page on CfA’s website, it seems like that will be a heavier lift. I’m looking forward to seeing it. Maybe once we refine it, a pitch can be made to move it to the brigade website, since websites are meant to give information and wayfinding.
Hmm @mzagaja I just played around with some of the permission/settings. It was tagged so that everyone could post an event, but I tried adding all the different “trust levels” to see if that helped at all. Want to give it another shot?
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Works now, thank you Em!
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Whether a “calendar” view exists within Discourse or outside Discourse, I’d advocate for three needs to be kept in mind:
- People need to be able socially share links to events to promote them within their own communities
- People should know where to go after an event to share back notes/resources
- People finding a promoted event after it happened should be able to track down what came out of it
Discourse works really well for covering all of these bases as far as being the official place that a “flyer” for each event lives. So if Discourse can’t be made to render a good calendar view, maybe wherever we render a calendar view primarily links back to Discourse posts.
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