Empowering everyone to publicise and share event information
Many of the amazing staff and students at the University of Cambridge give talks about their work and other activities. For a long time, there was nowhere to go to find out what talks were going on, other than the departmental notice board, plastered with posters, many of them out of date. But then a handful of Cambridge academics created Talks.cam, and shared it with the world to find out if it was useful. And it was! Talks.cam allows anyone to share the details of a talk – the date and time, venue, speaker, and abstract – making publicity for seminar series much simpler. It’s really easy to use.
The real power of Talks.cam is syndication: bringing the talks to people who want to attend them. When you make an account on Talks.cam (and anyone can – it’s open to all), you create a list of talks you are interested in. This could include one or two individual talks which you find by searching for the speakers you enjoy, or lists of seminar series which you have an interest in (whether a research group’s weekly discussions, or a set of evening public lectures on a popular topic). It might even include the talks list of a friend. Simply select how you want to hear about these talks – displayed in your calendar, as a webpage you can bookmark, or an email reminder before each event – and it will happen. You can also use Talks.cam within another webpage (for instance, that of a department or society) as a simple way of keeping event information up-to-date.
Talks.cam has grown hugely since then, with users contributing their ideas and developers making them real. Over 10,000 talks are listed, with over 1000 of them in the future.
Talks is now a CARET service and is used widely in the University of Cambridge and beyond. The EGRET project supported the creation of new features for Talks.cam, and helped it become part of the University of Cambridge infrastructure.
Get involved
If you are interested in helping support Talks.cam, or getting a Talks service for your own university or organisation, please contact Laura James.
