Rethink events section

[tfausak]

Events have extremely bad engagement. For example, this is MailChimp's link overlay from issue 117:

This makes sense to me: If someone is looking for a Haskell event to go to, their not going to search through Haskell Weekly for it. If someone isn't aware of a Haskell event in their area, it's unlikely that they'll make the connection thanks to Haskell Weekly.

I like that events give a sense of the overall Haskell community, but I'm not interested in continuing to spend the time on such a low impact section. (At least not in their current form; see #179.) If someone else is interested in taking over the section, I would support that. Otherwise I will remove it.

[tfausak]

Honestly a link to meetup.com is probably better than what I've got now. This is where I pull events from anyway: https://www.meetup.com/find/events/?keywords=haskell&radius=Infinity.

[Carloon]

I like seeing what goes on around the world. But I don't really use it. I can't volunteer to maintain it.

[chreekat]

Well, I'm only going to click on events near me. I expect others to do likewise. At the same time, I carefully scan the list every time, hoping to see something near me, or something that seems worth traveling for.

What are you optimizing for, exactly? :)

[chreekat]

To make my main point, I actually prefer getting info about events through Weekly for the same reason I like getting Weekly: I don't have to go trolling the web for news. I appreciate it either way!

[supermario]

Same as @chreekat here – I like scanning through the events, it's newsworthy to me that they are happening even if they're too far to attend. And sometimes – they're not!

[manuel-uberti]

Same as @chreekat and @supermario. I find the Events section useful and I'm always reading it to find if there is an event I could go to.

[tfausak]

Thanks for the feedback! It's useful for me to hear how people use the events section. I want to take a second to answer this question because I think it will help explain my point of view:

What are you optimizing for, exactly?

Overall with Haskell Weekly I am trying to optimize for maximum engagement (that is, opens and clicks) with minimum effort (my time spent). This is why I bother with curating the links and selecting featured articles rather than automating the entire thing like Awesome Haskell or Planet Haskell; I believe that curated links improve engagement and they only cost me about an hour of my time each week.

Specifically with regards to events, I want to show that Haskell has a healthy presence in physical meeting spaces throughout the world. I do this by going through the Meetup link I posted above and looking for the most popular event on each day. If there are several popular events, I try to choose ones from different places. Picking seven events from New York isn't as compelling to me as picking seven events from all around the globe.

This is time consuming because I have to click through to each event in order to understand what it's about and where it's happening. Often times I almost have to investigate the meetup organization as well. I do this because it filters out events like (to pick an arbitrary example) Be a Python icon in Machine Learning algorithms, which isn't related to Haskell at all but stuffs it in as a keyword anyway.

On the other hand, this filtering process also filters out events like SeaHUG's Category Theory for Programmers Part 3 simply because it's not the most popular event on that day. Based on your responses, it seems like I should be including that event (and many others!) to increase the chances of anyone seeing something nearby to them.

I think a solution that could make everyone happier would be to increase the amount of automation on my end as well as decreasing the amount of curation. Meetup provides an API for finding upcoming events, which I could use to produce a raw list of Haskell events in the next week or so. I could scan that list to remove obviously irrelevant events and then call it a day. How does that sound to y'all?

Edited to add: For my own purposes, this is what an API call to Meetup might look like: https://api.meetup.com/find/upcoming_events?key=...&text=haskell&radius=global&order=time&start_date_range=2018-08-09T00:00:00&end_date_range=2018-08-17T00:00:00.

[manuel-uberti]

The Meetup API sounds like a reasonable solution to me.

[tfausak]

I wrote a script for querying this information and returning it in the format that I use for Haskell Weekly. I've got to say, I like the results! It shows more events and includes more information about each event. Plus only one or two of the events would need to be pruned.

I think this is a good solution and I'll try it out for the upcoming issue. Thanks for your feedback so far!

[tfausak]

Oops, I meant to link to the script and its output: https://gist.github.com/tfausak/c275143017f8ab4999a4f36ea82cfce6

[chreekat]

Oh yeah, that looks great!

[manuel-uberti]

Fantastic indeed