Proposal: Create a dedicated "Events" category on Fedora Discussion

[lochipi (Cornelius Emase)]

Hi everyone,

I’d like to suggest creating a dedicated “Events” category here on Fedora Discussion.

Right now, we have an “event” tag under the News and Announcements category, but event posts are rare - and the last one was in 2023. Many events don’t make it here at all, which isn’t ideal for long-term visibility or follow-up engagement.

As someone involved in Fedora DEI and helping with community events (like this upcoming Fedora Docs Workshop), I’ve seen the need for a more visible and organized space to share event updates.

A separate Events category would:

• make it easier for the community and contributors to find and follow upcoming events
• help us track regional/community activity better
• provide a place for post-event recaps, feedback, and community impact (the Community Blog is great, but this could complement it in other ways)
• encourage more people to share event recaps, planning updates, and call-for-participation posts
• be more sustainable than relying on Matrix/IRC chats that disappear in time and also improves visibility and archiving of event-related content

This also supports the Fedora DEI goal to highlight contributor work, support regional advocacy, and make community activities more transparent.

All posts can still be moderated, so quality and relevance will be maintained.

Would love to hear what the moderators and others think!

@glb @ankursinha @jonatoni and other @moderators

Best,
Cornelius

[glb (Gregory Lee Bartholomew)]

It makes sense to me. +1.

[jflory7 (Justin Wheeler)]

I also endorse this. @moderators, WDYT?

[py0xc3 (Chris)]

We had already complaints in the past that the categories have become too many and thus things have become incomprehensible to people who are not already deeply involved. I am also not sure if people seek events in Discourse except what belongs in the Project Category.

I don’t say I am -1 or so, but wanted to mention the points that had been put forward in the past. I think somewhere is an open topic about how to decrease the number for the very reasons, but I think it is no longer active.

I like the idea, but not sure if the amount of events that are discussed here justify a new category. E.g., for the UK events we have already our own Project Discussion tag for the very SIG, and our respective other communication channels. That way we can also easily link our events to the #UK SIG/community and vice versa.

However, a compromise might be an “events” sub to the News category? So next to “Podcast”, “Announce list”, “Community blog” and such? That way we could see if it gets used or not, and it remains distinguishable from what belongs to Project Discussions. Not sure if that makes sense?

Anyway, before going into implement something like that, the first question I would ask: why do “eligible” (definition “eligible” yet undetermined:) events not make it to the News category at the moment? I mean, posted News are usually quite good visible here, and if an event is intended for the “general (Fedora) public” but does not make it to the News category, I am not sure if a separated events category would make the difference?

In any case, thanks @lochipi for raising awareness

Supplement: I suggest to move this to the Site Help & Feedback category as that category is for topics like this one, and that way you would get a feedback beyond commops/dei. Most mods/regulars review that category more frequent (some get pinged a lot and might not consider each time someone pings them, so “@ moderators” might not achieve the goal for everyone:)

[gwmngilfen (Greg Sutcliffe)]

I would +1 this - I hear the too-many-categories problem @py0xc3 metions, but for events there are some specific bonuses we can have…

All of the following depends on the Calendar plugin, which is used on the Ansible forum, so I’ll show some examples from there. However, I think we should have access to this plugin from CDCK, so it should be a non-issue (but I’m not an admin so I can’t check).

Firstly, in-topic events, with attendance, maps, etc. Example:

The “…” menu has lots of options, including a link to add the event to your calendar. Also, for free events, this could (potentially) replace things like Eventbrite, as it can manage attendance lists for door access, etc. The “…” menu allows for exporting a list.

Second, category-level calendars. Example:

Aggregates all the events in the category and sub-categories. We use this to group events, e.g for CFP closing dates.

Also (no screenshot, it’s similar) you can get a forum-wide calendar, eg Ansible. Obviously theis covers everything.

Side note - you can also do in-topic calendars. Example:

THis is less useful IMO, because it doesn’t play well with the forum/category-wide calendar, but it can do recursion which is nice for some meetings.

I would argue all of this is really useful to us, especially for grassroot organising of meetups (the Ansible calendar pulls data from Meetup.com to populate the events, for example).

Now, none of this technically requires a new category, it can all work as-is. However, the ability to create events at all is tied to a category-level permission (i.e. can this category have events?), and I would say it’s cleaner to disable that for most categories, and keep events in one place. That also means you can restrict who can create events to a higher trust level (e.g. TL2) so that we don’t get new and innovative types of spam

So, yes, events category + plugin is my suggestion

[x3mboy (Eduard Lucena)]

I have no specific opinion about it, but I think we should do a really deep recategorisation of the whole forum.

[jonatoni (Jona Azizaj)]

I’m +1 as well, and I really like the suggestion that @gwmngilfen has mentioned

[py0xc3 (Chris)]

@x3mboy

but I think we should do a really deep recategorisation of the whole forum.

That could be combined: use the opportunity to not just think of adding this category or not, but do a wider approach and discuss what categories we actually need, what make sense, what to split, merge, add, remove, etc.

I think that was already brought up a few times (so generally to adjust the amount of what “jumps into the face of the reader” at first glance; mostly about decreasing, but not specific to categories, and also within the respective categories), but somehow it disappears before something is ready for implementation. We are too much focused with other things in the “here and now”

By the way, I just reviewed it, and “News and announcements” is somehow redundant: that could be also “News and events” to shift more attention to events on the category level.