Localisation to enable deployment in different geographic regions

[danascheider]

Hey team! First of all, let me say that YES, I am absolutely volunteering for this and would not expect the core team to take on this kind of thing for me 😅

The Proposal

Calagator has been an amazing and central part of the Portland tech scene and I would love to see the same in other cities. It would be great to be able to configure Calagator to be able to be deployed in other cities/regions besides Portland. To facilitate operations of your deployed site, we could make Portland the default location.

What I'm Not Suggesting

I'm not suggesting localisation in the sense of the existing Calagator site detecting/adding a setting for location because I don't want to put that work on you folks to manage locations where you don't even live :) What I'm suggesting is making the code base configurable so that, if someone else would like to deploy the site to their own host elsewhere and use it in their area, they can.

Why?

I moved from Portland to Melbourne, Australia about 5 years ago and have missed Calagator SO much ever since! We only have Meetup here and it's a huge pain since you have to find a group of interest, figure out if it's even still alive, and if so when it has meetups. That's a lot of steps to find an event you might be interested in that works for your schedule.

I originally thought to fork this repository but thought twice for multiple reasons:

1. Half the benefit of OSS is having other contributors working on the same code
2. I want my location to have the same features, more or less, as the Portland one and it doesn't make sense to duplicate effort on multiple forks (especially since those may diverge in the future)
3. Forking repos divides the community - by enabling configuration of the app in this code base, it's likely to attract Melbourne contributors to this repo instead of having fewer contributors working on each code base
4. Melbourne/Australia in general is home to a number of large tech companies (Zendesk, CashApp, Envato, Canva, Atlassian, LinkTree, a few others) that could be possible sponsors of this app/team (I have no control over this so no promises of course, but I would be seeking support from these and other companies for our deployment anyway and would be happy to also request sponsorship on behalf of the maintainers)
5. Forked repos are more likely not to continue being maintained

Of course, if this idea isn't interesting to you folks or you think it'd add too much ops overhead, I'm happy to proceed with forking.

Conclusion

I'd like to (personally) add the ability to configure the location of the Calagator app, to enable separate deployment in different geographic regions, with Portland as the default.

I'm happy to do a Melbourne site in a forked repo if that's preferable but figured I'd suggest to join forces before I went with that.

Thank you so much for maintaining this amazing project. I wish every city had something similar!