What Are the Problems with Existing Event Aggregators?

[j12y]

In past developer relations roles, I've participated in the following events as part of a developer relations program:

• CES
• TechCrunch
• SXSW
• State of the Maps
• SpringOne
• DevRelCon SF
• Developer Marketing Summit

These events don't often appear in existing aggregators:

• confs.tech: 1 for 7
• devpost.com: 0 for 7
• wikicfp.com: 1.5 for 7
• eventbrite.com: 0 for 7
• meetup.com: 0 for 7
• sessionize.com: 0 for 7
• joind.in: 0 for 7
• developers.events: 1 for 7

The reasons those types of events don't show up seem to fall into:

• we won't accept marketing / b2b events
• we only accept academic / science events
• we only accept a type of event like hackathon or meetup
• we only accept events that are hosted on our platform
• we only look at events with open speaking opportunities

While all valid reasons to serve the purpose they exist and user they service, but that leaves no single source that exists to compile a list of events for all use cases needed by developer relations related roles (developer marketing, community manager, developer advocate, devex engineer, etc.).

[oleg-nenashev]

I also wonder about the events for DevRel subroles. E.g. I often go to the Community Management events, e.g.

• FOSS Backstage
• FOSDEM / Community Devroom
• Open Source Experience
• CHAOSSCon
• ...

Those are all valid DevRel events. For the WG, my interest for a new listing would be more in "DevRel professionals as a community" events where DevRels gather to chat with each other, not another listing of dev events as there are too many of them

[j12y]

What about personas and tools since those are also categories in which we'd be aggregating resources? Do you find those more interesting for us to focus on than event aggregation?

That may give us something we can all agree to move forward with and revisit events later.

[j12y]

At a PyCon one year, we had a Birds of a Feather DevRel session. Would that make it a DevRel community event because we made it happen that year?

If an advocate sits on a panel at DeveloperWeek with five other DevRel roles to talk about the profession, because we have a friendly chat about our experiences and careers in DevRel are we building community at that event too along with other DevRel professional and aspiring professionals in the audience? I wouldn't go to FOSS Backstage to meet other DevRels unless I worked on a relevant project, but others might so why should FOSS Backstage be included but not DeveloperWeek or PyCon?

I think I understand what you mean, but to include some events but not others really is unique to any individual's specific need. I believe that's the point we are trying to solve. In order to help all of us, we are looking to filter the superset of all events by some criteria of interest to us:

• show me only events where the persona of a developer advocate or community manager commonly attends
• show me only events where i can submit a speaking proposal in europe
• show me only events that have php topics and an expo hall with booth sponsorship
• etc.

Each person in our DevRel community has a different need for their role and product which makes a decision on where to draw a line arbitrary unless it is fundamentally inclusive.

This is not an easy problem, but is it a problem worth solving? A list of other aggregators already exists, we're not adding value to do that again so we should approach it differently.

What doesn't seem to exist is a system that allows for:

1. Exchange event data from other origin aggregation sources
2. Gather that data into a repository that is accepting of any reasonable events
3. Import data into a tool of my choice where I can annotate it with other devrel relevant attributes
4. Export my annotations according and conform to a schema back into a repository to share with others

                          annotated        
┌─────────┐                    ┌─────────┐ 
│ confs.  ┼─────────┐     ┌────┤ AirTable│ 
│  tech   │         │     │    │         │ 
└─────────┘         │     │    └─────────┘ 
                    ▼     ▼         ▲      
┌─────────┐      ┌───────────┬──────┘      
│ devpost ┼─────►│ Resource  │             
│         │      │ Aggregate │ ◄────────┐  
└─────────┘      └───────┬───┘          │  
                     ▲   │     annotated│  
┌─────────┐          │   │     ┌────────┴─┐
│ wikicfp │          │   └────►│Google    │
│         ├──────────┘         │  Sheet   │
└─────────┘                    └──────────┘

Another way to think of it is that we'd be aggregating in a way that is like having a cache or indexed data from other primary origin stores.

That's the proposal of this POC anyway:
https://github.com/DevRel-Foundation/wg-resource-aggregation/blob/poc/29/events-schema/events/events.md

[robearlam]

I like the idea of having a faceted event listing that encompasses dev events in general. I think if we focus purely on events for DevRel attendees then the list will be too small, and we could also end up with a gatekeeping problem where there are debates about which events are "allowed" into the list.

For me it would be better to have a super list of all developer events, allow anybody to submit new events so that if anyone notices that an event isn't included then there is a simple process to have it included. It then becomes the end users responsibility to facet the list to find the events that are of interest to them at that time.