I've been thinking a little bit about some things I'd like to talk about on this blog, and the first thing that I wanted to talk about was how we currently plan which dates we meet up on.

So, when we first started up, we said that we don't want to conflict with any other events which are on in the tech calendar for the NW area, and in particular, the Greater Manchester area. To do this, there are several calendars to check against. The first is that, organised by the NWDC group. This is obtained, via an hCal/iCal feed at Google Calendar. I add to this the Stockport Radio Society's calendar, which is another hCal/iCal feed at Google Calendar. Lastly, I add in the Where's The Geeks hCal/iCal feed at that website (which, incidentally, at the time I write this doesn't work with Google Calendar - so I currently have to jump on the website to check the week we're planning to meet on).

Once I've got all the events that are planned for that week, I stick it all into a website called Doodle. Doodle is a very basic event scheduler - you ask people to mark off which dates they can and can't make and then you get a tally for each date.

We tend to run the scheduler for the week between when we meet until the Friday of the week before we're booking against. This gives us anywhere from 3 to 10 days to advertise the next event.

As I write this, we gave notice on Friday (7th) that we're meeting next on Wednesday (12th) - 5 days, but this time I did something slightly different. We already know that we want to meet in two weeks time, so as I closed the survey for the week 10th to 17th, I started a new survey which covers the week 24th-30th. This gives us, theoretically 17 days for people to show interest, not just the normal 7ish days.

After we get the results of that survey, we put the date and time (as some people said they might want to do an all-day event at the weekends to incorporate a bar-b-queue - although, to date, none have occurred) into a template we've written and add in if there's any particular subject we'll be discussing. As we've started getting more serious about looking at spaces, this month's meeting will discuss Broadstone Mill, how we formally set up the administrative functions of the group (including money and all that jazz) and then hopefully we'll get to rip kit apart and see what makes it tick!

Once we've got that template all together, we do a few things with it. We e-mail a few mailing lists (including our own, plus those belonging to NW Hackspace, Geekup, ManLUG, Manchester Free Software amongst others), put a notice on our own blog, on the Where's The Geeks site, and sometimes even manage to put information on Upcoming.org and Hackerspaces.org! If you can think of any more places where these events should go, please post some details to our mailing list, so we can incorporate it into this routine.

We're keen to be as inclusive as possible - the more people who come to the events, the more long-term interest in the hackspace we'll have. To me, the hackspace is all about people, not projects (although, giant-robot style projects will interest more people!) so even if you don't think you're particularly good at electronics, or electrics, or programming, or robotics, but you *want to know more*, jump on in and let me know what dates you can make at the survey, and then come along! You never know, you might learn something you never expected to!