How do the "Upcoming events" links work?

Question

On the Beta page, when I click on any of the links about upcoming events, I only come to a chat page where there's no mention of those events. Is there any information about the events available and how can I access it?

Answer 1

Yeah that part is sadly a bit of a mess. The idea is that we schedule certain types of events that might be interesting to members of our community, with our main chat room serving as discussion and announcement platform, and the Community Bulletin that you're referring to as one way of announcing our activities to the rest of the community. Consider them also as an invitation, anyone is welcome to participate and the events are announced also via our @StackSpaceExp Twitter account. You can also register to our chat room events if you so wish, to also receive a reminder roughly 3 hours ahead of some event via your email (and in your Stack Exchange inbox).

Events we schedule are mostly publicly available live broadcasts (webcasts, podcasts,...), teleconferences and similar of events relevant to space exploration (rocket launches, televised extravehicular activities, conferences, media calls, presentations, workshops, lectures, and so on). Sadly, from what I've heard, chat isn't a priority for Stack Exchange developers, so the tools we have available to us don't really cut it for Space Exploration (I didn't notice other Stack Exchange communities scheduling so many one-off events like we do). So we make due, and one of our chat regulars (usually me) would post links to where the event can be accessed from, usually a few minutes before they start. For example, for a rocket launch, that would mostly be 20 to 30 minutes before the start of the launch window, for those launches that are actually televised. But we do schedule events with that in mind - the start of our event would match the time its broadcast begins.

Now, I've been thinking before to start a new Meta thread with additional information on each individual scheduled event, but even gathering information on them is a rather time consuming process, let alone announcing them at three places (now it's currently two places, one is our chat schedule, another is our Community Bulletin list, and I'm not even counting the announcement with additional links prior to the event). So I have yet to think of a format that would be both informative and not too laborious, something a lot simpler than what I started with - each scheduled event in its own Meta thread, like you can see a few under the scheduled-event. Writing all that is simply too much for more or less a single person doing it.

But we could use some simple list with additional links, because both ways to schedule events that moderators and chat room owners have available to us can only manage a single link. So that's why that single link would point to our chat room - it's where we share more of them, along with any other information required, plus we would often discuss these events live, which then often results in new questions or improved answers in our main Q&A. Plus, everyone can learn a new space exploration related thing or two and be up to date with latest developments.

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Addendum: So far, we have scheduled 259 events. That's a lot for a beta site that's merely a year old. Nearly every day (OK, let's settle for every other day) there's some space exploration event to watch, listen to, or participate in. I don't think that's the level of activity that Stack Exchange developers anticipated for community events, so we're kinda charting a new territory here. Tools to better handle this will eventually follow (I hope).

For the time being, I have a whole folder of web links that I monitor for new event announcements and sift through on a weekly basis. And if you noticed some other publicly available event (in English) that might interest our community that we haven't yet scheduled (note that we only schedule launches a few days in advance, since their actual dates are rather tentative), please notify us in our chat and someone will add it to our schedule.