Happy first birthday to Open Tech Calendar

Open Tech Calendar, the Edinburgh based website that lists local technology events, is going to be one year old on 24th July 2013. In it’s first year the Open Tech Calendar has listed more than 600 events from Aberdeen to Manchester and attracted 33,000 page-views.

The site was started by James Baster following his experiences with the popular Tech Meetup series of events. Tech Meetups are held monthly in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dundee and Inverness and I would highly recommend getting along to your local one and, if possible, paying a visit to a neighbouring cities meetup. James presented the Edinburgh event for 1 year and in this time there was a calendar on the Tech Meetup website which was widely used in the tech community, but this relied on Google Calendar and they didn’t take backups. Google Calendar was ill suited for the task and on 20th July 2012 the Tech Meetup team noticed that almost all the events had been deleted and there was no way to get them back. Therefore James set out to write a better replacement and just 4 days later on the 24th July 2012 it was born.

Since they early days of Open Tech Calendar James been expanding the site with new features he has developed over the course of the past year. The site follows the principles of Wikipedia; anyone is welcome to sign up and become a community member and then add or edit events. The beauty of this self curation is in keeping the data up to date and relevant. So far over 175 people have signed up. Open Tech Calendar has embraced the principle of Open Data, allowing anyone to use the events data they have collected and providing open APIs to make this possible.

Events from the site are sent around several local email lists, shown on several other websites such as the new TechCube incubator at Summer Hall and shown on screens in a large local technology office to employees.

James Baster said “I’ve meet people at events who were new to town and found events to go to with my site, and local regular attendees tell me how handy it is. It’s great to have made something that so many people find useful, and I look forwards to another year.” James Baster is a freelance programmer. He advises several local technology meetups, has talked at conferences and blogs on the topic of running technology events.

Jamie Coleman, Director at TechCube said: “James is well known in Edinburgh as a programmer who is driven to build tools to help communities. Whilst superficially simple, the Open Tech Calendar has already become a key factor in helping to catalyse the tech ecosystem in Scotland. There are a huge number of events but many were often hidden in particular silos or known only to a few within specific groups. Open Tech Calendar has changed this for the better.”

Open Tech Calendar, like the Tech Meetup Google Group and Scottish Startup Digest, is an excellent resource for the local tech community. I would encourage those with an interest in technical events to sign up to the mailing list and to contribute to the Open Tech Calendar.