The elmcity project began with a focus on aggregating events for communities defined by places: cities, towns. But I realized a while ago that it could also be used to aggregate events for communities defined by topics. So now I’m building out that capability. One early adopter tracks and promotes online events in the e-learning domain. Another tracks and promotes conferences and events related to environmentally-sustainable business practices.
The curation method is very similar to what’s defined in the elmcity project FAQ. To define a topic hub you use a Delicious account, you create a metadata URL as shown in the FAQ, and you use what= instead of where= to define a topic instead of a location. Since there’s no location, there’s no aggregation of Eventful and Upcoming events. The topical hub is driven purely by your registry of iCalendar feeds.
If you (or somebody you know) needs to curate events by topic, and would like try this method, please get in touch. I’d love to have you help me define how this can work, and discover where it can go.