Methodology

The calendar is built from the announcements think tanks already publish: newsletters, event invitations and programme emails, delivered to an address that subscribes to them. Nothing is added by hand from a press list.

Inclusion is never paid for: no organization can buy its way onto the calendar, and none can pay to keep a rival off it. Promotion is a different thing and is sold — a featured listing, and the Org Pro plan, buy an event more prominence, never a place. Anything promoted is labelled as such where it appears.

Events currently listed here come from 331 organizations. Every entry links back to the organizer's own page, which stays the authority on its own event — if a detail here disagrees with the organizer, the organizer is right.

Each announcement is read automatically and turned into a fixed set of fields: title, start and end, timezone, format, category, location, registration link, cost, a short description, and topic and region tags. Nothing is researched or filled in from memory — an entry contains only what the announcement said, and where the announcement was silent the field stays empty.

Every extraction is then checked by rules before it is published: formats and categories must be ones the calendar recognises, topic and region tags are kept only when they match our canonical list of 31 topic and region tags — the same ones the topic pages use — and registration links are followed to the page they actually point at. Each event is matched to the organization that announced it; when we cannot make that match with confidence, the event shows the sender's name rather than a guessed organization.

The same event announced more than once is merged into a single entry. Where the matching is certain it happens automatically; where it is not, the entries stay separate until a person decides.

Announcements are processed as they arrive, usually within minutes, so there is no overnight wait for new events. Duplicate checks run several times a day. The Policy Week Ahead page and the public feeds are rebuilt at most once an hour; topic, organization and event pages are built fresh on every request.

Be clear about this: most events are published automatically, and no editor reads every event before it appears. What exists instead is a set of checks that route the doubtful cases to people: an extraction the system was unsure about, a sender it could not match to an organization, and a suspected duplicate it could not settle all go to an internal review queue that we work through.

An organization that claims its page can edit its own events directly — title, time, description, location and links — and those edits are live immediately. Every edit is checked automatically afterwards: a change that fails a basic check (an end before its start, a link that does not belong to the organizer) is reverted, and a change that looks doubtful is reviewed by a person while staying live.

Times are stored in UTC and shown in the event's own timezone, with the abbreviation that applies on that date — so an event in July reads EDT and the same series in January reads EST. The exception is the Policy Week Ahead, which lists every time in US Eastern so one week can be read down a single column. Server-rendered pages never use the reader's timezone, so what a crawler sees is what a person sees.

A record marked date-only is shown as a date, never as an invented midnight. When an announcement states no timezone at all — common for online events — the time is recorded as UTC and the assumption is noted on the record rather than hidden.

Not everything a think tank sends is an event. We leave out research reports, papers and article announcements; editorials, press releases and blog posts; purely informational or administrative email; and anything with no date and time for a live gathering, including recordings and on-demand video.

We do not exclude events because they cost money or are open only to members. Where an announcement states a cost, it appears on the event page; where it does not, we say nothing about price rather than implying the event is free.

If something here is wrong — a time, a title, an event that moved, an event attributed to the wrong organization — tell us and we will fix it: contact@thinktankcalendar.com. Corrections are free and always will be.

Organizations can also take over their own listing: every organization page carries a “Claim this organization” button, and once a claim is approved its members edit their own events themselves. See for organizations for what that involves, or the FAQs for the shorter answers.