Hello,

I'm James based in Scotland. For 7 years I ran Open Tech Calendar listing mainly in-person tech events.

After a pause I'm now relaunching Open Tech Calendar to list virtual events - this shift in focus is due to personal life changes that mean that virtual events is what I'm interested in, and looking at other sites that are now doing a great job listing in person events in Scotland. I know virtual events aren't as popular, but when I talked about this on social media, people suggested many reasons that virtual events may be preferred - public health, child care and other caring duties, people in rural areas.

I am specially going for events that include community participation - I'm keen to avoid "this virtual tech event could have been a video" and instead encourage events that people can get involved in.

We are also provide Open Data exports and are keen to encourage events to provide Open Data we (and others) can just import and reuse. Happy to help with options for that.

Brief word on the tech: I'm collecting data in a GitHub repository, then building that into a SQLite database with an Open Source library, then it's a Django site to provide all the filter options and open data feeds I wanted to provide. It's hosted on one virtual machine with Apache caching content.

So:

Constructive feedback on the project and site welcome!

If you know any good virtual tech events, do add them! You don't have to be the organiser. There are details how on the site, or just comment here with details.

Thanks, James