B. Mann Consulting

First up, I'm going to do the call out of upcoming Vancouver events:

• Wednesday, April 30th (tonight!) is WordPress Camp, put on by the folks at Tazzu - I've got Dad night every other Wednesday so I won't be making it this time. Maybe someone should set up a Vancouver WordPress Users Group and do this regularly? VanWUG!
• May 9th and 10th is DrupalCamp Vancouver - I'll be talking about install profiles and likely a "getting started with Drupal" talk where I go through all the core modules; more on this in a full post
• early June date TBD DemoCampVancouver07 - back to the "regular" format of 30 second pitches and voting on stage for full talks; maybe we'll do this right after the F&F event

Check Miss 604 for another recent event round up.

In general, I'll mostly be doing full descriptions of events that I'm hosting / help organize around startups will be over at the Bootup Labs blog. Coming soon there is a Vancouver Founders and Funders in June after the Toronto event.

OK, on to the topic of "one calendar". Or rather, a consolidated calendar. There really are a lot of events going on in Vancouver, and it's hard to schedule new ones, it's hard to get a central overview of them, and it's hard / annoying to cross post Upcoming / Facebook / wikis / etc. Several people coming to DemoCampVancouver have said something along the lines of "I'm new in town, how do I find out about more events". Answers like "read these 10 peoples' blogs isn't really a solution.

I had lunch with Rob Lewis from TechVibes the other week. TechVibes continues to work on re-vamping their site (they'll be going through a major re-tooling over the summer) and we came around to the subject of events.

TechVibes has an events calendar, but it's painful. Yeah, they know it :P We talked about adding value there, specifically getting the community involved and providing something of value that the wider community could get involved with and rally around (e.g. not a TechVibes direct "property" per se).

I came up with two concepts.

One is for TechVibes to enable cross posting from TechVibes to Upcoming and other sites (Facebook? can anything post an event to Facebook using the API?). Post in one spot, get cross posting goodness "for free", which sounds like a good reason to post to TechVibes for those of us organizing and promoting events.

In general, I'm a fan of Upcoming. As Brendon said, it's great to use in San Francisco, since it's got full coverage of everything from tech events to arts. Here in Vancouver, coverage is a little spotty. I try and enter everything there because it is on the public web with a permalink (as opposed to Facebook...).

The second concept is around TechCouver. Buzz Bishop is leading the media charge to make this another Vancouver nickname - and that's great. So let's make TechCouver a local aggregator of tech-related blog posts and events.

The map is great as well, and we could use both. Basically, have tech companies and bloggers enter a listing for themselves including an RSS feed. We aggregate all the feeds, and run our own TechMeme for Vancouver. Well, minus the secret algorithm -- I'd like to do voting so we can see "best of" posts as well as the "river of news" of recent stuff.

So, one central spot for tech related postings and events, one central spot we can direct people to, to find out what's happening in TechCouver.

What do you think? Is this interesting? Useful to you? Would you visit it? Would you subscribe to it and/or use the OPML file it would generate? Let's use this TechCouver wiki page to discuss features and such, or comment here.