What is needed to get more usage and promotion out of running a central calendar? Who wants to help?

Talk to @jonchui about using VanCal for StartupDigest instead of a Google Calendar - startupdigest.com

Can tag events with "startup digest", can have people all centrally edit the calendar, still email out the "digest" to the list, just use VanCal instead of a Google Calendar.

why would events use it? what's the value to them and what are the downsides?

To have a central place where someone new or not immersed in the community can go and find all events.

To promote their events to a wide audience.

To build a central list of venues in Vancouver.

To save time in not having to duplicate various 'what's happening this week/month' lists. (orgs can use tags to curate such a list)

Lots of chicken vs egg here - depends on whether you think a central calendar is a good idea or if discoverability is an issue.

To answer Erin's question "what is the benefit over meetup?" -- not all events are posted on meetup, and there are many different meetup groups that you need to be a member of / subscribe to separately. This is meant to be a central place where all events go.

A central calendar is a great idea. As someone "new" to the startup scene in Vancouver, it is a tad challenging to get on all the right lists and boards.

Step one would be to collect a listing of all the existing calendars and reach out the owner of each and talk to them about unification.

Boris, do we have a place to collect info? Dropbox/PixelCrafters/GDocs, etc?

Hi Erin -- not sure what you mean. If you're interested, I'm going to be adding people to a Basecamp project.

Other than that, the original intro post has more links and such (e.g. Github issues etc.) pixelcrafters.ca

Yes, Basecamp is good. Thanks for the explanation. Will dive into this on the weekend.