Discourse has a neat Events Plugin 
- Plugin - Discourse Meta.
It also works well with the Locations Plugin 
- Plugin - Discourse Meta.
In the Regional Networks > Deutsche we are sometimes posting events.
Offering to create topics that contain event metadata in return allows to subscribe to generated calendar feeds that allow integration in one’s own Personal Information Management (PIM) system.
Could this instance be equipped with the Events Plugin upon the next upgrade rebuild?
Hi @jonr,
Thanks for sharing! Great to hear that you are sharing events within the regional networks. I’m flagging this for some of our communications team members (@fracy , @Alejandra_Casas ) for them to have a look at and ascertain if this might fit into PKP’s communications around events.
-Roger
PKP Team
Great contribution @jonr
@fracy and @Alejandra_Casas know I’ve been having “veiled complaints” in mattermost for a while about having to track pkp events from www.eventbrite.ca. 
As much as possible, I try to avoid registering in a thousand different platforms because (by action or omission of the platforms) it is usually the way to guarantee a leak of personal data… but at the same time I think that publishing events behind a register is an impractical way to disseminate activities and content and (in my opinion) contradicts the very principles of PKP.
What would you think about using an open and free tool totally integrated in PKP’s own infrastructure… instead of using eventbrite? How about publishing the events directly in the forum?
I mean, if I have to share my personal data, let it be to PKP and not to a third party platform whose only objective is profit.
Thank you for taking it into consideration,
m.
Now this is an interesting idea. If I understand Marc correctly, a Discourse plugin like this would enable us to have a Discourse post for every event, including an opportunity to register - which I would definitively prefer to using yet another external, commercial service.
I would still say that every event should also be on the website, if only for archiving purposes. But moving registration to the forum sounds like a very interesting idea, and it would automatically open a place to discuss PKP events…
Real kudos for @jonr that found this nice plugin for Discourse… I’m just bumping it. 
But yes, looks like we have some nice combinations to publish the events in our forum instead of third party tools. This video shows the Events plugin:
https://www.loom.com/share/50e1562176a84514bf95ce8c38f07f6e?sid=76401bc9-3095-4359-9e4a-4430b44926f0
But as the video explains, there is no need to link with third party services if you don’t like… as the Calendar plugin will let you publish events and visitors will see them with their local time.
Obviously, it’s up to PKP decide about the tooling… I’m just politely asking to avoid registering to any random platform to be informed about what is happening.
Cheers,
m.
Subscribing to an external .ics Calendar for example works really well with Nextcloud.
Imagine only subscribing to the calendar of your Discourse sub-category/-ies you’re interested in.
I’m seeing two things here:
1st, for real event planning with registration, nothing really goes above Pretix, released as FLOSS.
As an alternative to eventbrite, the ActivityPub federation is also previewing https://gath.io, https://gancio.org, Mobilizon and an emergent standard with https://event-federation.eu/. Note Discourse categories can also be federated, but might lack integration with that for the moment.
2nd, this might rather be an observation inviting for assessment of SSO integration with a PKP IdP for its community services?
Wait for how well it integrates with the https://meta.discourse.org/t/locations-plugin/69742 and per-category maps of community events …
… which reminds us of the fact, that Discourse has a very usable API and can be sourced for structured (metadata) and unstructured (text) data from a web service.
This is especially useful for those who are careful about whom they share their personal or professional details with.
1st, for real event planning with registration, nothing really goes above Pretix, released as FLOSS.
I’m quite sure we don’t need something as big as pretix.
I would feel more comfortable with gath or gancio or even better, this same PKP forum (if we can manage to make the registration optional).
I think we are only registering people to avoid been intruders in the videoconferences, but this is something Famira or Alejandra know much better than me.
Note Discourse categories can also be federated.
If new discourse platforms consolidate, this is something we would need to explore.
2nd, this might rather be an observation inviting for assessment of SSO integration with a PKP IdP for its community services?
It’s over my pay rate, but if were my responsible, would be something to think about.
Just check out what else
could do for your public communication.
And then also
https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/
for your blog.
Hello everyone!
Thanks @jonr and @marc for bringing this up and giving us the idea of using the discourse event plugin. We have been talking about it in the Community Team. It makes sense to implement, however, as with all the other things in PKP. We still need to conduct tests and gather more information to see how it will fit into our workflow, align with our values (I think this point is pretty clear by now), and benefit our community.
To summarize, yes, there’s a possibility that we will implement it soon, but we are still in the research phase.
I will keep you posted 
My main use case for the ICS export would be to add the events that are regularly announced e.g. by @ronste1 / @ronste in the Regional Networks and Translations > Deutsch category to my personal calendar.