cruel to be kind

Imagine a conference or a meetup for your geek / tech / social media interests and it is only 0-2 timezones away. You (mostly) can pay in Euro when you arrive and you will meet mostly fellow Europeans. Does that sound cool?

One small problem though: You usually learn about those things after they happen. Because we all seem to be more informed about conferences / meetups happening in Silicon Valley than around our corners. Which would be Europe of course, in case you where wondering.

So, how to solve the problem? Well, beat them with their own tools and help those two groups on upcoming.org to grow:

• European Tech Conferences


Add all conferences to this which happen in Europe and do have English as a basic language.

• European Tech Meetups


the same as above, just for the more meetup, geek dinner kind of meeting.

Additionally it helps if you would start adding your events to upcoming.org with enough information, for example the language it is held in as well as where it is happening – always in local spelling as well as in English. Don’t forget the tags either. And if it is a local language only thing – add an english summary at the top to help others understand what it is about.

The usual rant about unusabe web applicatoins, this time upcoming.org:

• you always need to click on one of the tabs just to get a search field
• you cannot search by month or date range – for example if I want to research how long my next trip to the US should be, I might be interested what is happening in September – no way to do it
• and you cannot search efficiently by country/continent/region in combination with a tag or word.
• make sure to include several versions of one and the same word, because event search does not have wild card function – you need to enter podcast, podcasting, podcaster, podcasters in order to get all of those
• as usual, good and bad actions lie next to another like “write a message” and “remove”
• you cannot set the language the event is held in – that of course would help search for upcoming things a lot, but then again, one would have to think about the fact that there are people who are not monolingual. ;)
• subscription options only work decent with Yahoo. I don’t care that this is a yahoo company, I will never ever switch to them, I am only annoyed each time I cannot add this / use this with my calendar of choice.

Why at all use a system like this, if it is far from perfect and not even ‘local’ as in european? Well, first of all it is better than the rest. Which only means that by the moment a better system comes along, many users will switch.

Second there is no reason to stay in a silo of European only applications – we need to infiltrate those american sites to show them that we exist too.

So, go on and add the conferences / meetups you know about and I did miss when researching them (I only found about 25 events which seemed to be happening in english), and if you have an event of your own, do add it. If you know about one and it is not there – bug the organizer or do the entry on your own.

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Tags: conference, european view