Hey, so Events and training | Co-operatives UK has a good list of events, but I almost missed one in Edinburgh last week because I don’t check it regularly. Does anyone know if it’s possible to get an Open Data feed of events from that web page? Preferably in the standard ical/ics format? Or maybe do we know who does the website and I can ask them? 
Then I can put them into my normal event systems and make sure I don’t miss anything. Thanks, “Open Event Data” James
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Seeing that the uk.coop site is running Drupal I’m sure that a ical/ics feed could be generated by it, I’ll mention it to @athertonjohn (I’m at the workers co-op weekend).
Coincidentally I was talking to @coopsmark about events listing, he is interested in an events database for organisations like those involved with CTRLshift.
My suggestion, to save from having another website to maintain, was to add a events plugin to this Discourse forum:
Would people find that a useful thing to have?
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Thanks for asking!
As for that plugin, I’ve had a quick play and it seems to have a decent ICS export feed to export things as Open Data … which is what I care about 
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Would this be something that would work for or be found by “more than co-ops”? I’m thinking the wider solidarity economy, environmental and social justice networks.
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Indeed. As I understand it an event/calendar feed can be incorporated into a compliant calendaring application, like a subscription, so that the user could just have all the events in that feed appear in their preferred calendar app.
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he is interested in an events database for organisations like those involved with CTRLshift
Would this be something that would work for or be found by “more than co-ops”? I’m thinking the wider solidarity economy, environmental and social justice networks.
That is a very good question. Are people happy there is a good enough overlap between “organisations like those involved with [CTRLshift]” and Cotech? Would events start appearing on the Cotech site that are nothing to do with co-ops, and are people happy with that?
I’ve spent years running a site where people list events, and if different people have different ideas of what kind of events are suitable and which aren’t, problems can ensue.
ps. Graham, that is indeed exactly one benefit of an open data feed! Did we get a co-ops uk one?
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I had a brief chat with @athertonjohn and @aaron about this at the workers co-op weekend about this, I recall that John might have said he will raise it, but it was a rather hectic weekend and I’m not sure if anything will come from this.
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I’ve added the events plugin to this site and added dates and times to these two posts:
And they now have iCal links and can be found on:
Both the agenda and calendar can be accessed from the hamburger drop down menu. If these listing turn out to be useful we might want to link to them from the public site at www.coops.tech.
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On CoopHack, sorry I didn’t fully update the original post before now. Unexpected but I’m in hospital at the moment after a chest issue 
Anyway, the date is 5th and 6th, and the venue is now The Middle Floor above Wharf Chambers Coop. Which means that 1. there is now a bar downstairs! and 2. we could work overnight from Friday through to Saturday, crashing in sleeping bags if need be.
I’ll get more details put together and keep everyone posted.
Sorry to head about your illness @ben-dcdcio, best wishes for a speedy recovery.
The CoopHack venue and overnight option sounds great, it will give us Sunday to recover!
I have pinned the CoopHack and the Goodnight Disruption posts until the dates they take place on, I’d suggest that @ben-dcdcio and @polly might want to edit the top posts and perhaps the titles some to make them clearer even listings (add images of flyers if they exist etc).
I also added the location plugin and added the venues for the two events with dates and you now also have a map link for them and it seems to work quite well.
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Arse, I should have tried it out some more. Every time you hit refresh on https://community.coops.tech/calendar.ics?time_zone=Europe/London the events get a different UID. This obviously breaks things for importers that try and import the same feed more than once. I will make an issue upstream.
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There: ICS export is broken; UID's constantly change. (And add Sequence) · Issue #51 · paviliondev/discourse-events · GitHub I haven’t done Ruby for years and years - if anyone who has wants to try a fix and make a present of a pull request that would be cool.
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This is an awesome calendar plugin! I just added the ical feed to my main calendar.
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@kawaiipunk I moved your post from the category description post (these are supposed to be locked, I’ll check the others now), see also the calendar, agenda and map, these seem to work quite well also, we might want to consider adding links to these from our www.coops.tech site?
So I’ve been asking about an open feed from Events and training | Co-operatives UK too and got no reply - so I sat down and wrote a Python Scrapy scraper to get the data! If anyone wants the scraper - or wants an iCal feed of the resulting data - message me. The feed contains links back to the Coops Uk site for each event, so the source is clear! I’ll post the code/links publicly later but there are a few things I need to sort first.
Also, If anyone has some Ruby skills do check out ICS export is broken; UID's constantly change. (And add Sequence) · Issue #51 · paviliondev/discourse-events · GitHub and help make the data from this forum open! Thanks.
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@chris @athertonjohn @aaron Can I ask again about an events open data feed? It would be really handy to spread news of these events further, and for people to be able to pull them into their own calendaring systems and be able to get news of upcoming events. Thanks
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@chris @athertonjohn @aaron Also, I’ve just noticed there isn’t https://schema.org/ markup on it. Can I suggest that is added? That would help with open data as well as being a good boost for SEO.
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