About us

What

FrenchChicago.com is a unified calendar for the French speaking community of Chicago. We are an all-volunteer effort and encourage anyone to import, create, and edit events.

We aggregate events so that users can visit a single source to discover interesting activities. Event organizers and participants share events with others through the web. Event planners can use FrenchChicago.com to check for possible scheduling conflicts, allowing them to make smarter decisions. Many people check the site regularly to find out what events they can attend each day.

Who

The French Chicago calendar grew started as a text file on a person's destop trying to categorize all French speaking events and meetups in Chicago. That person decided to build a public, non-commercial website website for sharing these events.

Getting started

Find local events

Browse

• Browse an overview of events for the next two weeks.
• Browse events in the future and past, and filter by date.
• Browse venues and view future events occurring at each venue.

Search

• Search for events at the top of each page.

Subscribe or export

• Subscribe to a list of events with your favorite calendar or feed reader.
• Export a single event to your favorite calendar.

Share local events

• Add an event by entering its details.
• Import event(s) by entering a URL to a feed or webpage, or via a bookmarklet.
• Improve content by editing events and venues.

Get involved

Anyone can participate. There are no entrance requirements other than interest and enthusiasm for the project goals.

Step 1: Sign up for the mailing list.

Step 2: Be on the watchout for interesting events and check out these websites

• The Chicago French Language Group a very big group on meetup.com. Also a lot of people show up to the rendez-vous.
• Groupe Francophone meetup: a smaller group that welcomes people who can speak French. No beginners.
• The FrenchInChicago website (not to be confused with our own, frenchchicago.com - notice the very important "in") and their Facebook group.
• Alliance Francaise de Chicago, their Facebook group and their Facebook calendar.
• Have another interesting website? email the maintainer of this page so it can be added here.

Step 3: Contribute!

Use the site.

• Learn about and share events.
• Spread the word! (twitter, your own blog, direct people to the events that you added above).

Help garden the site.

• Help us remove duplicate events and duplicate venues.
• Add details to existing events and venues. Add translation to French/English.
• Correct missing venues and incomplete venue addresses.
• Contribute French/English translations of pages and event descriptions.

Come to the meetings.

That is the purpose of the website. Participate in real life.

Credits.

We are using Calagator, a Ruby on Rails web application that runs well on UNIX, Mac and Windows. You can find more details on downloading the source and running it at its Google Code Page.