Community Calendar - options other than Google Cal?

Working Groups & Communities
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re: WNFS in Google Cal https://github.com/wnfs-wg/spec/discussions/22#discussioncomment-3362092

Which led me to https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs-docs/issues/1237

I find the Google Calendar version of these things to be not very visible, discoverable, or linkable (look at that link!). Rather than sending them to Google Calendar, I’d pitch you on adding it all to either the IPFS Discourse calendar here OR create a Luma community for all of IPFS.

Here’s some background on the Discourse Calendar/Event plugin (which is installed) 🗓 Discourse Event - plugin - Discourse Meta

I definitely am going to be feeling the pain of running 4-5 working groups with a monthly cadence – never mind ones that I attend or special events. For some of them, this IPFS forum is a pretty good fit. Any other thoughts on cross organizational events? Would it be useful to have a live call around this to kick ideas around?

cc @BigLep

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@boris: thanks for posting. I haven’t had bandwidth to look into this. Getting the IPFS Community Google Calendar was already a stretch for the week.

@danieln: I wanted to make sure you saw this given you picked up Add a link to the IPFS community calendar · Issue #1237 · ipfs/ipfs-docs · GitHub . Thought, input, action on proceeding is welcome.

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TBC — you should go ahead and get that into the docs.

But if we’re going to be running global community events and working groups it will be helpful to have something more discoverable. And probably some other attributes we’ll want to compare / contrast.

@danieln have a call next week and we can brainstorm more. So @BigLep call this an FYI, we’ll ask you for input, but this shouldn’t be “on your plate” I don’t think :wink:

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@boris and @danieln : I’m curious where you ended up on this.

One issue I see with the Discourse calendar plugin (like we used in IPFS Thing 2022 - sample event) is that it doesn’t appear to have an easy way to get a .ics out and that stays updated as times change/move. (I see in 🗓 Discourse Event - plugin - Discourse Meta that .ics export is supported but I couldn’t find it.)

Again, I’m not wedded to Google Calendar but at least for me it will be a challenge if I can’t see events inline with the other things I have on my calendar.

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We ended up as no one taking this on :wink:

We discussed this today with the #pln Spaceport team — and flagged the same issue. No discovery, no linking to be able to share.

That is — a GCal solves certain things but for me (and others I’ve interviewed) just having 100s of events “in” a calendar doesn’t help me plan out eg a quarter at a time in a more agenda style.

There is ics support in Discourse. It’s either in the header or there might be an option / theme to display a link. We pretty much turned on events without doing much else here :wink:

I’ll be doing more around this as we do some customization with our Fission Discourse — I’ll report back.

I’m also looking ahead to LabWeek and thinking about Sched https://sched.com as a tool for people being able to build their own calendars for those busy multi track multi event multi org spaces.

Let’s keep this thread alive if others also have calendar ideas to drop in!

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That is — a GCal solves certain things but for me (and others I’ve interviewed) just having 100s of events “in” a calendar doesn’t help me plan out eg a quarter at a time in a more agenda style.

Indeed, that’s our main problem with the community calendar — it’s all or nothing.

What’s more, if you copy an event into your own calendar, it doesn’t stay in with the main calendar

What about Luma?

In our latest advocates <> stewards sync we discussed using Luma given our positive experiences at IPFS Thing and your (@boris) use at Fission.

The only thing we’re missing is the ability to invite a shared calendar which would make the transition easier.

I reached out to the Luma team to ask about this and was told it’s not currently still not possible. I’m still in discussion with them to see if there’s any way to push this forward.

On the positive side, attendees on Luma get a calendar invite sent to their calendars.

Open questions

  • Is having all community events on a single shared/group calendar a deal breaker? @BigLep
  • How’s your experience been using Luma for the Fission community? @boris
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It works for us at Fission and I run it for some other communities as well.

We’re following our pattern for new working groups we set up. We either create one event at a time as needed, or in the case of working groups we have at the very least repeating monthly calendar calls.

People have the option to subscribe to one or all of a series and it shows up in their calendar.

Updating the events will send out updates to subscribers — and optionally can send email update too.

The one quirk is that there is no concept of community owned events. The work around that we do is having a “Fission Events” account that has a shared email and is always a host of all of our events.

Thoughts on Setup

Roughly, this would look like:

  • setup a Luma community eg “IPFS Community Events” and set a short name like Fission - Luma
  • set approval to anyone can join
  • connect it to the IPFS Discord — new Community members get announced with intros in Discord

As they join, people write an intro / bio, and can optionally say where in the world they are. You can add custom questions.

There is a built in sort of bulletin board system where you can make posts, and those posts get sent by email. Admin only post / edit.

You’ll need a couple of admins.

You can set “anyone can post events”. Maybe start like this and see how it goes l? Alternately -/ a have a larger group of admins from eG PLN member companies who can post.

For example, I can target both the Fission community and the IPFS community with one calendar event.

There are lots of per event options, including invite only or approval needed. And even token gating on Ethereum or Solana.

Admins can use tags to restrict visibility. EG only those people tagged with “IPFS operator” can see certain events.

You can embed Luma events in Discourse — see this example Fission & Friends Poutine in Berlin - Events - Fission Talk (needs to have Luma allow listed in Discourse settings).

There are various other embed types.

Downside? It’s a proprietary product where you’re sending lots of traffic to URLs you don’t own. But — you’re also doing that with Google Cal :wink:

What I’d like is domain cloaking — eg luma/IPFS community could actually be events.IPFS.tech or similar.

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@danieln : I’m just going through old messages and wanted to check if you’ll make a posting here about IPFS · Luma

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Yes. We have a blog post lined up for publishing announcing the new calendar.

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Happy to share that the new community calendar is up. You can read more about it in the blog New Year, New IPFS Community Calendar | IPFS Blog & News

Or just subscribe to it: IPFS · Luma

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