Open Tech Calendar Blog
We list virtual tech events that include community participation
Open Tech Calendar Blog
The transfer of OpenTechCalendar to the stewardship of Sheffield Digital has now been done.
With the news that in the future Sheffield Digital will be running the calendar, this is a special blog post for those with user accounts at the moment.
A year ago, we announced that we were looking for the next people to run the calendar. And we are now pleased to announce who this will be: Sheffield Digital
Thanks to Andrew van Duivenbode who has made an Alexa skill for Open Tech Calendar
Last week was our 5th birthday, and we got cake!
Want a regular morning post in your slack channel?
There are a lot of blog posts that criticise hackathons as a general concept, and without exception we think they all get one thing wrong.
We now have a WordPress extension to let you show events on your blog. You can filter these down to be from several cities or groups only if you wish.
Lots of the tips we post here for organising tech events are about making people feel welcome and able to contribute to your meetup. But here's maybe the ultimate in things you can do to encourage people - just explicitly do something for new people and clearly say so.
A lot of events use Twitter to communicate with attendees and allow 2 way communication, and that's fine. But the problem comes when some events use only Twitter to communicate with attendees, under the mistaken delusion that that will include everyone and it's fine.
After your event one of the problems is knowing how you did. I say problems, because this is actually a lot harder than you think.
One of the things that I think is key to a good technical talk is to introduce concepts instead of getting bogged down in code details.
One of the side effects of building a calendar of tech events is that we're also building up a pretty good list of active tech groups, and it's time we started making that more useful.
It's one week after our launch and we wanted to thank everyone for the positive feedback!