Re: [libreplanet-discuss] cataloguing free software events globally and locally

[Kurtis Hanna]

There has been a lot of work done by the wonderful people at
https://indieweb.org to, in essence, create a reverse engineered, fully
FOSS version of Facebook Events.

More info: https://indieweb.org/event

They are federating the Web 2.0 experience entirely, actually. While not
everything in the IndieWeb world is fully FOSS, I would probably say
that 95% of it is. From what I can tell though, the 5% that isn't FOSS
isn't made available to users, but instead is only used by the authors
of the code. The one exception to this seems the services provided by
Known Inc https://withknown.com/ which has created proprietary services
on top of the fully FOSS Known Core platform.

Users that wish to interact with these events need to have an IndieWeb
site. This mainly consists of HTML5 marked up with microformats:
https://indieweb.org/microformats

You can build this site by scratch if you'd like:
https://indieweb.org/Getting_Started

There are also CMS options for those who want to try that out:
https://indieweb.org/Known
https://indieweb.org/Getting_Started_on_WordPress

Here are the IndieWeb's principles: https://indieweb.org/Principles

I personally recommend trying out Known. Here is their source code:
https://github.com/idno/Known

FYI - They are contemplating changing the name to Idno to help
differentiate this fully FOSS platform from Known Incorporated.

Here are the docs: https://known.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Here are some community plugins that let you syndicate posts and events
to other social networks like Mastodon, Archive.org, Diaspora,
WordPress, etc: https://known.readthedocs.io/en/latest/plugins/community/

Personally, I think that if we want to compete with the Web 2.0 Facebook
Events reality, we need to offer a Web 2.0 replacement option. iCalendar
email attachments is never going to be a mainstream competitor for
people who grew up with Web 2.0 functionality.

On a somewhat unrelated note, Ward Cunningham, the creator of the wiki,
was so inspired by this group that he created a new wiki platform which
most people haven't even heard of called the Federated Wiki:
https://github.com/fedwiki/wiki

I'm curious to hear everyone's thoughts about this.

Cordially,
kurtis

Daniel Pocock:
> 
> 
> One of the biggest concerns people have about leaving platforms like
> Facebook and Meetup is that they fear they will miss out on events.  I
> just put up another blog[1] about this topic in fact.
> 
> What tools do we have for sharing data about events in other ways?
> 
> For example, are there any free software tools that make it easy to send
> birthday invitations using iCalendar (.ics) email attachments and is
> this an option for mainstream use?
> 
> For larger or more public events, what could be done to gather and
> distribute data effectively in iCalendar HTTP feeds, similar to the way
> that Planet software aggregates and distributes RSS?  If we could use
> such techniques effectively for events in the free software world (and
> the IT industry in general), it would provide a useful model for other
> communities.
> 
> I recently used search engines to try and find out about events and
> dragged up a bunch of sites, some local, some international:
> 
> http://freie-termine.ch/
> https://www.ch-open.ch/events/aktuelle-events/
> http://www.ossroadmap.ch/
> https://fsfe.org/events/events.en.html
> https://opensource.com/resources/conferences-and-events-monthly?month=2017-07
> https://lists.debian.org/debian-events-eu
> https://lists.debian.org/debian-events-na
> https://lists.debian.org/debian-events-apac
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Events?rd=FedoraEvents
> 
> but clearly there are far more events out there, just in the free
> software world, that don't appear in any of these sites.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Daniel
> 
> 
> 1. https://danielpocock.com/how-did-the-world-ever-work-without-facebook
> 
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