News about // foss.events in Europe

This weekend we had our first hackathon in 2024 in the city of Franfurt. We had a great time, a lot of fun and we actually finished some long awaited milestones:

• We now have One map to show them all: With #84 we finally implemented #65 so now the front-page shows a map that shows all upcoming FOSS events of the running year registered on // foss.events. We still have some improvements in mind, see #92 if you are interested in helping.
• We have a news site! With #85 we introduced our own news page. If you are interested in the latest news about // foss.events and about foss events in Europe make sure to mark this page and keep an eye on it. Again, this is just the the beginning and further improvement will come, in particular we are researching best ways of embedding fediverse feeds as a news-service to foss event visitors. Stay tuned!
• Thanks to vkrause our event pages and our index page are now delivering structured data following vocabulary by schema.org: With #83 and #91 our event pages and index page are using microdata, introduced by schema.org to deliver easily machine-readable structured data. Structured data shall help crawlers, indexing, APIs etc to integrate and reuse data delivered by // foss.events (e.g. by KDE's Itinerary). (btw we use Open Database License and Creative Commons for this data, see our about:license)
• We better deliver concise and structured date we have cleaned up our database and have improved our new event form: On one hand we reduced complexitiy by removing some data fields, on the other hand we cleaned old data using that data fields and we straightened input options for future data.
• With #67 have started to deliver our pages with semantic HTML: Semantic html helps machines to understand content of webpages, which is again helpful for crawlers, indexing etc but even more for people who need electronic assistance, like screenreaders, for discovering the web. So far we only have the news-page in semantic html, but be assured more pages are to come.
• Not visible but very important: With #88 fixed a security issue that so far people were able to introduce code with our event-form. This is not possible anymore, but: you can use markdown instead ^^

And these are just the most obvious changes and milestones. In addition, we fixed a lot of smaller issues and thanks to M we also have a couple of new events on our pages.

Thanks to @weeman and for the cccffm for having us as guests. And in memory of #37C3 we now have an earworm again of "Captain Kirk is Climbing a Mountain" : D

Our new event form is super helpful but unfortunately still a bit overloaded. This is not only but also thanks to old data field that need some clean-up. We understand that for new users this can be overwhelming in the beginning. That is why we have written down a detailed and hopefully helpful help page for you : )

We have created some templates for our issue tracker in our Codeberg repository to streamline bug reports and feature requests for // foss.events. These templates are designed to help you provide detailed feedback, making the process more efficient for both our community and our maintainers. This update will improve our responsiveness and help to resolve issues quickly.

Remember that // foss.events is a community project and your input is crucial to its continued development. We hope these templates make it easier for us to respond to your needs and for you to contribute effectively.

It is done! With PR #303 we have completely rewritten the backend of // foss.events and now have an underlying database.

Although not visible, this brings several features for users: You can now easily add an event using a web form at https:/ /foss.events/new-event. The web form makes submitting new events much easier than before, when people had to fill out an email template. Submitting events is also much less error-prone, as several fields have a pre-defined set of values you can choose from, ensuring standardised data.

As well as revising the event submission form, we are also pleased to announce the introduction of 'edit this event' options. Each event page now has an "Edit this event" button at the bottom of the page. Whenever you see data missing or incorrect, you can click to edit this event and improve the accuracy of an event's data.

This new feature also makes it much easier to submit an event if it is a recurring event, especially if it is held in the same location every year. In this case, you can open the previous edition, click "Edit this event", change the date and probably a few things here and there, and that's it - submit your new event.

The new database also makes it much easier to accept submissions in the backend. And faster! Once approved, each event will appear on the front page instantly.

And we have even more ideas about what we can do with the new database. Stay tuned!

Unfortunately, the data we used to create our new database has seen a lot of chaos and wild growth, so the web form still has some hiccups. The order of the data is not yet user friendly and there are some unnecessary fields that we will be getting rid of to make it easier for you to contribute. The same goes for some of the defaults you can select that are unnecessary. This will be done over the next few weeks.

In the meantime, you are very welcome to submit your event](https:/ /foss.events/new-event) and test our new form and give us feedback at contact@foss.events. You are also welcome to help us get things done in the backend and have a look at our issue tracker and see where you would like to contribute.

We are pleased to enlighten our community by implementing a Dark Mode on // foss.events, a feature that has been requested for long. Dark Mode reduces eye strain and saves battery life, making a perfect match for late-night event exploring or in other low light environments. As usual we keep things in a simple and user-centric design.

With PR #302 // foss.events automatically adjusts light/dark mode to your system's light or dark setting. Users who wish to manually change however can easily switch between modes using the sun icon at the top of the page (see PR#304).

Let us know how you like it and provide us your feedback.

After watching Carina's talk on how to make your software project more reusable by others during Hacking in Hell, we updated our README.md to include the "about", "purpose", "installation instructions", "usage", "contributing" and "licence" sections directly in the readme. This is not only in line with our commitment to fostering an open source community, but also to ensuring that our practices contribute positively to a more sustainable technology ecosystem by making reuse as easy and standardised as possible.

Btw, not only do we embrace sustainability of our software by enabling reuse, we also have an eye on responsible coding practices that are environmentally conscious, privacy friendly and efficient. You can read more about our efforts on our about page.

Our // foss.events Fediverse account has a new home! [We have moved from mastodon.social to fosstodon.org (https://fosstodon.org/@foss_events/109462370345767931). This move aligns us more closely with the vibrant FOSS community on fosstodon.org, especially with several event organisers active on Fosstodon. It will make us part of this vibrant hub and allow us to create a common timeline with the FOSS community, facilitating better engagement and collaboration.

Follow our new Fosstodon account address to get the latest news from // foss.events

the dawn of a new era: we have a blog (see previous post)