Laura points to this post on how to build a community calendar, and there’s some interesting stuff in there. I wonder if some of it would be useful for the ORUK crowd?

But the choice of technology quickly becomes secondary compared to the real challenge ahead: How do you make people aware of the calendar? And how do you solve the chicken-and-egg problem? Without events, there are no users, and without users, nobody sees a reason to publish their events on your platform.

It’s published on the blog of an open source project called LAUTI, which I have never heard of – and I must admit it wasn’t immediately clear to me what a ‘community calendar’ is, or at least not entirely. Turns out LAUTI is an open source Eventbrite alternative – with a fair few differences, I’m sure.

It’s a nice idea though, and it reminds me of a thing about online community building that I perhaps often forget, which is that communities can focus on any kind of interaction – it doesn’t have to be a conversation. It could be links, or uploaded photos, or videos, or in this case events, linked to a theme or a place around which the community can form and develop.