Let’s take back control of our events! #JoinMobilizon

Care Mobilizon
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I’ll just introduce myself, and throw in some specifics, that might be helpful for a start. @how invited me into the chat. I’m one of the current devs on https://radar.squat.net/

I’m at this stage not actually sure what Mobilizon are planning, even down to how and what would federate. I’m now in their matrix chat, and will be trying to keep conversation open as things develop.

I think technically it sounds like they’re looking at some activitypub with schema.org which is certainly the direction I was thinking in. What I’m not sure about is how much they want to make instances be able federate or interact with each other and at what level. The whole problem space of sharing events is something we at radar have come over again-and-again. So maybe it helps me writing something of our model and experiences so far, before returning to the activitypub end of things.

Radar itself is particular, it’s ended up like that as it covers a lot of real-world organisational realities. Our core entities are:

  • user (accounts) - which are only used to log in, and depending on how people operate are individual or shared
  • group - which have members (user accounts with roles) and events and can have a location (or multiple). Groups usually correlate to a group of people who are organising a space - this is the case where the group has a single location. It can also be groups organising events in different places, or groups that organise listing events (usually for a city eg. Plotter Köln, Stressfaktor Berlin, Backbord Luzern etc.) Each group can set their own permissions for who can post events, and if it needs moderation.
  • event - they are related to a group (or multiple groups) and location (or multiple locations). Events can repeat, and individual repeating events can be edited out of sequence.
  • location - an address, point on the map, or area. (And because it’s squat.net if it is or was a squat :wink:

[Even more technical aside: basically everything here, except for event repeat rules, maps very nicely into schema.org, including the relations]

Lots of groups, the type of groups with a location who run a space, import their events from their own sites using iCal. That or they export the events from radar and display them in their own site using the API (with plugins).

Radar integrates with other’s APIs too. Like Plotter is its own site and radar imports events from their API. This is where different data models become interesting. Plotter does also have the concept of an organising group and location. Sometimes it has these attached to events, more often they don’t have an organising group. So Radar needs to accommodate the idea of events only being in a ‘listings group’ (these being like Plotter).

We’ve tried, and would love to also work with federating events with other listings too - demosphere has always been one of these. The lack of machine readable metadata has been one of the largest stumbling blocks. iCal is pretty rubbish for forcing a format for the location for example. Let alone the format for Organizer that could theoretically, but never (yet) in practice map to groups. So till now it’s been best if the people running a calendar are interested in working with us like Plotter where we end up with a custom integration.

The related trouble has been, and it’s even more apparent with Indymedia, that there’s no authority or identity on events or organisers (groups). Most of the listings groups so far basically have a monopoly on posting/moderating for their city, whether they do it by pushing events into radar, or entering them themselves. So there’s no duplication. Indymedia, and possibly demosphere instances, however overlap events and there’s little way of working out duplication and authority.

This is one of the points activitypub became very attractive. Groups can have their endpoint as defined by their url/@account and events can be related to this. We can have a standard for pushing them around, but maintaining authority.

So that’s where I started coming to this from. I don’t know what else you’ve managed to get out of Mobilizon devs, but if you want anything more about how we could work together socially or technically as radar on this AMA!

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