Thanks to whoever updated the calendar in the space, I added a few bits but thanks again!
One thing that seems to be severely lacking is the online calendar, it’s been really out of date for a couple months, members meetings dates that changed etc…
Is this something @events wants to pick up maybe, can we give access to a few members so we can collectively update it?
Question is how do we fix this?
Hi, I know there was an extra members’ meeting that was in the Calendar for this week — the previous meeting had moved the meeting eight days earlier, but that had its own calendar entry — but what else have you noticed that meant it was ‘really out of date for a couple of months’? It would be really helpful to point out these instances when you see them.
I still think an ‘upcoming events’ list would be very useful in the space: a simple vertical table of the things that are happening, that you can take in at a glance. At Build Brighton there’s a list on the door as you leave, which seemed like a great idea: it kind of says “you’re leaving, but these are things you might want to come back for”.
The calendar is fine, but towards the end of the month it seems a bit useless as it doesn’t lend itself to rolling round to following weeks, so personally I find the Google Calendar better to view upcoming months and weeks…but it’s early days: if members find it useful then it should stay.
Overall having upcoming events physically written in the space is a valuable thing IMHO.
Not wishing to be a broken record, but the Dashboard totally has an upcoming events section that shows the next N things that are scheduled in an iCal calendar. If that was by the door, you could see the upcoming events whilst checking when your bus/train is leaving when you leave 
The thing I noticed in the calendar was the members meetings that were jiggled around weren’t updated until a bit late. They’re correct now, though (well, I assume?).
It might be quite nice to have members with access to the calendar, if nothing else it means less work for the directors…
Things like inductions missing and social nights that didn’t happen on or on wrong dates are examples.
Good, so just a couple of errors here and there. Just checked the next few months and everything is spot on.
Currently we don’t put inductions in the calendar—in theory it’s our ‘Public events calendar, though it includes members’ events too—but if we did decide to that would definitely need more labour, as it would expand massively from the current 5 recurring events, which really don’t need much calendar admin at all: it’s a minuscule task in Makerspace terms. Or should we wait and see what @naxxfish’s iCal has to offer, can it get events directly from Discourse, for example?
What he is saying is that if you put events into a Google Calendar like the one we already have then it would display a list of the next N things, just the same as out homepage does now:
iCal is just an Apple file format for sharing calendar events that is widely supported by sites like Google.
In other words he isn’t offering a solution to the programming of the calendar but the display of it in the space, it cannot load from Discourse or anything fancy like that and I’m sure they he would agree that it probably is best that we keep Discourse as a forum and use proper calendar software for calendaring.
The reason I posted this is because it is quite hard to find all the events, inductions and what not on Discourse so if someone maintained the calendar with this stuff it would be good.
I agree it’s a public facing calendar but why can’t it include inductions, that way prospective members can see all the exciting things we do.
also @Dermot : yes, this 
The dashboard can display events in an already existing calendar (the Google calendar we already have). Especially, it can show the next coming event, and the current event, that you can see at a glance.
There’s also the possibility of having two calendars - one for members only events and another public facing.
I think trying to integrate things into Discourse is going to be complicated and, if other plugins are anything to go by, difficult to maintain.
So something positive is emerging from what felt like a bit of an unfairly critical first post there. Seems a good idea to have a calendar populated with all events, inductions, block bookings etc that can integrate with other systems/alerts…and probably separate from the one linked our homepage, to avoid cluttering it up.
Let’s propose that and have a think about who would maintain it. Perhaps best for techs who set up inductions to do their own calendar entries, then they can adjust/link as needed…but that’s getting into minutiae…
It would make sense for an internal calendar to have somewhat wider access - that’d help with getting things in there without being a burden on the “admin”.
I wonder whether it’s something that could be built into the membership system somehow… not necessarily the calendaring tool itself (Google is pretty good at that), but some way of giving members access to it in a straightforward way.
I wonder if one issue is prompting the people who would know. Perhaps there could be something like a monthly automatic mail to all @roles to reply with dates for the coming months.
Sounds like good plan for keeping it centralised under a few people’s responsibility, without a huge burden of work, which might mitigate against the risk of a sprawling mess — I imagine that correct formatting is going to be critical for information from it to be properly displayed in the space.
This could tie into something @naxxfish and myself have been talking about in terms of administering the inductions through a signup on the membership system.
That would make it easier to grant the permissions at the end, and handle waiting lists, but it could also list out the dates of inductions to a file.
Then we wouldn’t need anything else other than the public calendar for ad-hoc events.
Slight thread hi-jack. As promised at the last member’s meeting, I said I would try and sort input to the TV so it would default to @naxxfish’s Makerspace dashboard (e.g. calendar) but if something was plugged into the HDMI cable then that would appear.
After reading a bunch of Amazon reviews, it seems the issue is that most auto-switchers only switch to a new source, they don’t switch back when it goes away. As far as I can see the only product that advertises itself as holding a secondary source and switching to a primary one if it’s there is this:
Shall we get it?
Note to self: also need an HDMI cable with right-angle plug (ie flat against wall)
A month later, I just actually ordered the box + cable.
