Tracking upcoming community tech/startup events in India

If you've been reading this blog via an RSS reader, you might not have noticed a new addition to the blog sidebar. With the number of unconferences and community tech & startup events rapidly increasing over the last year, it's been getting harder and harder to keep track of what is happening.

A few weeks ago, I created a widget to pull in the RSS feed for the upcoming unconference and tech/startup community events in India. If you visit the blog and then scroll down the right sidebar, you'll see this widget with a list of upcoming events.

The cool thing about the widget is that its sharable. If you click the "Options" menu below the widget, you'll get options to share it in a number of ways. If you would like to put this widget on your blog, click HTML and copy and paste the code onto your blog. You can also put it on a whole number of social networking sites. There is even an option to put it on your desktop as a gadget (you'll need to download some software though).

So much for sharing the list of events. How can you get an event onto this list? Good question. These are the steps -

1. First, you'll need an account at Upcoming. If you have a yahoo account that should do
2. Next, join the group India Unconferences and Events. This is the group that tracks the events
3. Third, create the event on Upcoming
4. Once the event is created, you can assign it to the group by clicking the "Send to group?" link on the right sidebar of the event page
5. Once you have tagged the event in the above manner, it will be picked up by the widget and displayed wherever the widget has been shared (pretty cool no?)

So, hopefully you'll no longer have a situation where you learn about an event only after reading the post-event coverage :)