Happy Birthday Open Tech Calendar

We have a special shout out to Open Tech Calendar to wish them a Happy 4th Birthday! There are a lot of unsung heroes in the Scottish tech community that work extremely hard to create a more vibrant and successful tech industry in Scotland. Open Tech Calendar is a prime example of this so let's help them celebrate turning 4.

Happy Birthday Open Tech!

I talked with James Baster, the Android and web developer who helped create Open Tech Calendar. Baster has always been up for meetups, getting himself evolved with the Edinburgh Tech Meetup, presenting and help running it, for over a year and decided the Scottish tech community needed an easier way to locate and promote events. We are really glad he did because this site has become one of our go-to’s for finding and advertising meetups for RookieOven! It’s a fantastic site and while talking to James I got to hear about their journey to their 4th birthday!

Open Tech Calendar is when it comes down to is driven by passion with a lot of freedom, for example they have no offices and working from home or wherever they so please. James says their funding “the site’s only income has been our sponsors, who have very kindly supported us.” All of this allows them to dedicate their time to helping people find great tech events near them. James says “We also help the tech community work together for everyone’s benefit. We provide a platform of Open Data to make the data more useful and for others to build on.”

He explains that Open Tech strives to be a directory for tech events rather than “take over”, more of a way to help promote links on their homepage. “We try and make it really easy to add events, and employ several UI/data tricks to try to make sure our data is kept up to date.” Really they are giving companies like RookieOven another platform to spread the news about great events like our Monthly Meetups (Next one this Monday! August 1st)

Celebrating 4 years:

James went on to tell me about how the idea of Open Tech came about:

“Open Tech calendar was started in July 2012 after a similar calendar run by Tech Meetup was accidentally destroyed. Tech Meetup always was and still is a place to bring the community together, and we thought that was a great thing that should be encouraged. For instance, they have always had space during their events for other announcements.

We set out to create a calendar that made the data more useful in terms of filtering, could welcome more contributors in a safer manner and crucially, was less likely to be accidentally destroyed. Our initial version was a rough website launched using an Open Source wiki platform in a long weekend (Mediawiki + hacked plugin). However, it was clear from the response to this that the community was interested.

We grew over time. We moved to our own custom platform as it quickly became clear that there were UI/UX challenges that our initial platform couldn't handle. We Open Sourced our own custom platform in Feb 2014.”

For their 4th birthday they launched https://find.techin.scot/ to experiment with a different approach to find the best way to reach the tech community within Scotland. "We are constantly trying different ways to get the message of what we do across and working on our UI...We will be looking for other data sources to add to this site!"

So how do you fund something like Open Tech:

James says "Simply sponsorship. We view Open Data as a very important thing for us and our embrace of it is one of the things that has made Open Tech Calendar the platform it is. This causes problems for us sometimes in terms of measuring our impact and persuading people it’s worth their time to add events, but we just embrace the openness and do what we can."

Best Wishes:

Well Open Tech, RookieOven is definitely a fan and wishes you guys another wonderful year and a very happy birthday!

Find out more about Open Tech via:

• Open Tech Website
• Open Tech Contact
• Twitter
• Facebook