The Event Blog now has an Events Calendar

Over the years, mutiple pads with event lists, private websites with calendars etc. have been created. Collecting the information has been tedious and it is often unclear who is maintaining these lists (or whether anyone does at all). This made it difficult to submit and publicise events and also to find them. We wanted to improve this situation, so a new feature has recently appeared on the event blog: the events calendar.

You can find the calendar in the menu bar, under “Calendar”.

To get started, we delved through the sources mentioned above, collated events, cross-checked with information from the events’ own websites, and researched some details ourselves. Our wish for the future is that you will notify us by e-mail if you find that an event is missing. For details on how to do that, please read the next section. We will also keep our eyes open and add events as we become aware of them.

Contribute an event

To have an event published in the calendar, you can send a short e-mail to blog@events.ccc.de. We ask that you provide the following information, as far as is currently known:

• title
• location (we would also specify “online” here if applicable; for presence events we would want at least the city, but would prefer a full address)
• first and last day (we don’t process the time of day)
• website
• organisers (name – consider omitting a group’s legal status such as the much-loved German “e.V.” – and e-mail)

The criteria for including an event in the calendar are not set in stone, although the event should be somehow connected to the Chaos and relevant beyond its city or region. If you’re not sure, you are welcome to write to us and we will decide together. Please remember to inform us about any changes (such as: date changed, exact location now known, website now online, event cancelled).

We select some events for inclusion in the right-hand column in the “upcoming events” widget. The selection is mainly based on the size of an event and its proximity in time to other events, the latter because we currently display no more than two upcoming events. To potentially include your event as an upcoming event, we need one further item:

• a square teaser image or logo (width/height 200 to maximum 400 pixels, keep file size small – possible measures include choosing correctly between JPEG and PNG, removing an alpha layer, reducing the number of colours, converting to WebP)

Subscribe to the Calendar

The events on the calendar can be subscribed to as a digital calendar. They will be shown as “all day” events, without times of day.

The address to subscribe to is: webcal://events.ccc.de/calendar/events.ics

URLs beginning with webcal or webcals may seem unusual. The data will in fact be retrieved via HTTPS. Using webcal(s) avoids the common error of retrieving the data once, saving it locally as a file and then importing from there. This would only include the calendar content of that time, automatic updates would be impossible. Common calendar software such as Thunderbird (on desktop systems), ICSx⁵+Etar (Free Software on Android, the links given here are their entries in the free app store F-Droid) and the iOS calendar software understand webcal(s).

If clicking on the link shows no reaction, the problem might be the operating system not knowing which software should handle webcal(s) URLs. In this case, one option is to 1. copy the URL to the clipboard (webcal or https), 2. start subscribing to a new calendar in your preferred calendar software and 3. paste in the URL in the subscription dialog. But you might also be interested in registering your preferred calendar software as the one responsible for the webcal(s) scheme. For Linux, you can find pointers in the ArchWiki, via man xdg-mime or on StackExchange.