In case you haven’t noticed, FOSS Force now has an events calendar, and we want it to be the most complete open source events calendar you’ll find anywhere! Here’s how you can help.
You might have noticed that we’ve been making some changes here at FOSS Force.
It started about six months ago when we changed the theme that gives our site its look and feel, which happened because the developer of the theme we’d been using since our start in 2010 quit supporting it, meaning it was time to move on for security reasons.
More recently we’ve been hard at work adding a new feature to our site, a calendar of of open source events that we’re hoping to make the most complete listing available on the internet.
About Our Calendar
The idea came to us several months back when we noticed that often our awareness of an open source conference came on the event’s opening day when we read about it on another open source website, which pretty much meant it was too late to do any of the planning necessary to make it possible for us to attend the event and cover it for our readers. This led to realization that there needs to be an online place for people to find all of the events ahead of time, so we got busy putting together our Open Source Events calendar, which can be accessed from any page on our site simply by going to the horizontal menu near the top of the page, just beneath our masthead (that would be the graphic with all the penguins).
The calendar, which is presented in list form, is completely searchable, which means you can find an event by date, name, location, or any other metric that occurs to you. Clicking on any event in the list will bring you to a page that includes not only our write-up on the event, but easy-to-find pertinent information such as dates, times, and locations, plus a link that will take you to the event’s registration page. What could be cooler, eh?
The fact that you can search by location is important, because we’re also opening the calendar for local and regional events, for example local Linux user groups and regional events, such as the Meetups that All Things Open hosts.
As far as the large national and international events are concerned, we’re not only including events that are exclusively focused on open source software, such as SeaGL, the various Open Source Summits or All Things Open, but are including any event that covers open source topics in a nontrivial way. For example, although VMware is primarily a propriety vendor, we’ve included their Explore conference (formerly VMworld) because of the large number of open source subjects that will be covered, often by speakers coming straight out of open source communities.
How You Can Help
So how do we find out about all of the open source events happening around the world? That’s where we need you to help make sure that nothing slips by us, especially if you’re part of an organization that puts on an open source event.
For this reason, we’re making it easy to nudge us and let us know about an events that might otherwise escape or attention. Again turning to the horizontal menu below our masthead, next to the item that will take you to our calendar, you can click Submit an Event to…well, submit an event. Just fill out the form, and don’t be fretful about how well you do or do not write, because we’re likely not going to be using your words anyway. We’ll use what you tell us about the event as the basis of a write up that we’ll produce in-house.
Notify us, no matter how big or how small the event. We would like to make it possible for a person wondering how to connect with Linux users in their area to simply go to our calendar, input a state name, and see any and all LUG meetings happening nearby, as well as other small open source-focused events that might be happening at a venue such as a local community college. We think that would be a real service.
Oh, and lest we forget, all listings on our calendar are completely free, so if you submit an event we’re not going to be bothering you to try to sell you a listing or anything like that. We’ve put the calendar together for the good of the open source community, not for the good of our pocketbooks…because that’s just how we roll.
In addition, as long as your event fits what FOSS Force is about — which is free, open, inclusive, and community driven technology — we would be interested in helping your event further as a media sponsor, which from our end means we’ll make sure that your event gets plenty of pre event coverage, as well as ongoing coverage while the event is taking place. All we ask in return is that you publicly acknowledge us as a media sponsor on your website and at your event, to help people learn about FOSS Force and what we do. If you would be interested in having us as a media sponsor, there’s a box for you tick in the submission form. Tick the box and we’ll contact you to and start the ball rolling to make it so.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
