Curating events

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Simon Willison ran Lanyrd Wikipedia YC, an events thing that was GREAT and might be good to chat about this.

I find myself entering events → like Vancouver Cocktail Week → that I am very much not the creator or host for. I’m the curator / finder for it.

I’d like to check a box and say “this is not my event”. This could get listed as an unclaimed event.

As part of new event creation, could search title and see if the event already exist (would need a different flow for this).

This also then leads to a sort of curation function, which is a much larger feature, where what I’d like to do is add an event that isn’t organized by me (which means it then shows up for me as either Going / Interested / Not Going) onto a calendar I’m curating.

Maybe the drop down status field could be used for this?

Screenshot of Status drop down - Planned, Scheduled, Cancelled, Postponed, Rescheduled
Screenshot of Status drop down - Planned, Scheduled, Cancelled, Postponed, Rescheduled440×360 39.3 KB

Curated? Not sure what the verb is here that I am doing.

I wrote about this in the calendar aggregator thread, where you then also need to “claim” an event as the official one.

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Ah you beat me to this! :slight_smile:

Part of the vibe in Oakland and the East Bay recently has been an interest in resurrecting event listing and calendars, cause the bay area feels very fractured and disconnected right now. There’s a lot of listing events on eventbrite, luma and Instagram.

I’ve been talking to two efforts in the bay area, COYOTE media collective, who are planning on building an events calendar app, and the Oakland Review of Books who is currently publishing weekly list of events as blog posts (here’s this week’s and the index).

Both of these are going to face these same set of issue in providing a way to list events without being the event organizer, and i know both teams are concerned about the amount of work involved in maintaining their lists!

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Yeah, I was thinking about how this could play out once someone “claims” the event. They’d have to create the record themself and that would mean a new Smoke Signal URL.

What I’d like to avoid is adding some sort of event change that points to the new one. I think this could be a good use case for a sidecar record.

{
    "$type": "community.lexicon.calendar.claim",
    "subject": {
        "uri": "at://did:plc:them/community.lexicon.calendar.event/same-record-key",
        "cid": "the_cid"
    }
}

Smoke Signal would look to see if a “replacement” event exists for it and would either display a link to the other event or redirect to it.

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You know, the more I think about it the more i think that claiming events isn’t maybe a thing. I wonder if we end up with a world where there are On Platform Smoke Signal events, and Reference/External event listings.

Here’s where my heads at: The only likely way that a calendar curator is able to list an event is if there is already an existing URL(s) for that event.

At that point if the external event is already taking RSVPs on some other platform, shifting event organizers to Yet Another Events Platform seems unlikely. They’re going to have whatever management tools in place for the time being, and run with it. The place you’re going to pick up event organizers is between them planning events.

I also am not excited about Reference/External events looking like Smoke Signal events. Like there should be some significant visual distinctions probably, or something else where it’s clear that it’s a curator’s take/reference/observation about an event.

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In Luma, it’s literally two types of events. The non native ones are just pointers that have day / date, location, and link to the actual event / registration.

Lanyrd was amazing and had great flows for claiming.

I don’t think this is at all figured out and needs to have eg the Vancouver crew to decide what they want to do about scraping.