[socal-piggies] Too many tech event collisions in LA

[Chuck Esterbrook]

It's great that the LA tech scene is taking off! Now we have a new
problem. Too many events are taking place on the same night. Even
prior to tonight, which has at least 3 simultaneous events, there have
been collisions like:

* LA Geek Dinner or LA .NET Geek Dinner?
* LA Geek Dinner or Power PR?

Tonight is:
* SoCal Piggies at Disney, or LA .NET Geek Dinner, or MindShare?

I'm soliciting ideas on how to avoid this in the future. Or at least
make it easier for event organizers to see what other events are
taking place on a given night.

There used to be optionla.com, but that seems defunct. I think it was
retired in favor of http://upcoming.yahoo.com/ but that isn't tech
specific and I get A LOT of noise when looking at upcoming events in
LA. Things like exotic bus tours and music promotions. Nothing wrong
with tours and music, but we need something tech focused. And getting
back to optionla.com, I had some technical difficulties that made it
less than ideal. But the problem we're having now, at least imo,
validates the idea.

Perhaps all we need is some psuedo-community calendar on Google or
something, give key people write access and promote it. I'd call it
the "LA Tech Calendar".

Another idea is a wiki so we could also post profiles of repeating
events. "LA Geek Dinner takes place on the 3rd Tue of each month."
etc.

I'd rather not piggyback on BarCampLA's site  because it will confuse
people into thinking the events are BarCamps or BarCamp-related.

I'm looking for more ideas and comments before moving forward.

Fire away,

-Chuck