Best, Mark

http://PortlandWiki.org/OccupyPortland

Hey Mark,

Off the top of my head, it seems like a whole Calagator instance might be
overkill just for Occupy Portland, as it would be creating yet another place
for people to look for information, apart from other well-established
activist calendars in PDX. Can you tell me more about how it would be used
and what kinds of events would be put there on an ongoing basis?

Cheers,
Reid

I think I forgot a break:

Interest is setting up a Calagator for #Occupy, Portland or otherwise?

I was thinking for all the new Occupy actions starting to happen, if there
is an easy way to sort by location.

The need for a focused tight organizing online schedule for that was going
to be happening at the location - if there was a flexible and robust way to
schedule things that are happening on a daily, hourly basis - that would be
helpful.

Might be overkill - but I think there is a need.

p.s. is there a list of activist calendars that you know of?  I haven't seen
anything near touching the awesomeness of calagator.

Glad to see this came together. :) Let us know if you run into any
interesting issues running it.

Cheers,
Reid

Calagator is using v2 and as of v3 Google no longer requires an API key.
Just one more thing that might simplify install and configuration.

--
-/matt/-
http://youell.com/matt

I tried switching to v3 a few months ago, but found that its geocoding
was always wrong, their docs for making maps were badly-written
fiction, and the giant angry threads suggested that it wasn't just me.
Unfortunately, they've since deprecated the v2 API and claim that they
might drop support for it any day, so it'd be good if someone can give
v3 another try because they may have since fixed these issues,
improved the docs, someone else has published docs for how to use
their APIs, or someones published a gem that includes the necessary
workarounds.

We currently rely on a heavily-modified vendored copy of
"gmaps_on_rails" and a three year-old version of "geokit", so new,
better stuff may be available.

I'd be very glad if someone could explore how to use the v3 API for
mapping and geocoding with Rails 3.x, and report back their findings,
or submit a patch.

-igal

On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 2:32 AM, Igal Koshevoy <i...@pragmaticraft.com>wrote:

Our current geocoding is done with an ancient version of "geokit" and
mapping with an ancient, heavily-modified "gmaps4rails". Both of these
libraries have been recently updated, so it may be worth trying to upgrade
to them.

If someone can take a shot at this doing this against the "rails_3" branch,
that'd be great.

-igal

On 10/19/11 3:19 PM, lind...@activatepdx.org wrote:

It went up last Friday but didn't catch on. (It is empty now as the
events we entered rolled off.) There is actually quite a use for it
IMHO, but the barriers are many. Namely, users must 1. be aware of it,
2. understand the Calagator concept, and 3. find it better and more
understandable than Google's calendar widget which seems to be the
current favorite of OWS sites.

We set it up as a catch-all (national list of events), with the intent
of providing filtering by city as interest increased.

Calagator is definitely a good platform for this. Good luck! (Also you
can contact Mark via @OccupyCalendar. Not sure that he's watching this
list.)

--
-/matt/-
http://youell.com/matt

For example, your activationcalendar.com's full-month widget forces me
to stop, find a clock to figure today's date, then scroll three
screens down, then scan sideways a few columns to find today's events
-- and you only have about three events a day listed. As you have more
events, this becomes even less usable.

I strongly recommend using Calagator's agenda-style view.

-igal

Easy things that people could contribute to help with this:
* Upgrade the "rails_3" branch to a recent "geokit" and "gmaps4rails",
that'll add many necessary distance calculation and
geographically-specific finder functions.
* Put together mockups of how a person would filter events, venues and
feeds based on location and distance. They would probably need a UI
and query parameters to specify a location to search from, via geopip,
browser geolocation or freeform text query that can be geolocated; and
a distance. E.g. you'd use this to display events within 50 miles of
where you're at.

-igal

BTW, thanks to you folks who have put together Calagator over the years.
I was one of those who didn't get it at first, but eventually came
around and now don't know what I'd do without it.

--
-/matt/-
http://youell.com/matt

I have been mentioning a Calagator version of calendaring for over a
month in the Occupy Google groups. No one in tech responded. Even
though there apparently had been this effort for a month. I had no
idea until last night when I happened into Igal. I have been pretty
heads down lately and not monitoring this lsitsserve for is what is
usually an aside stream for me as  the tech calendar group

Now, with OP having lost a physical presence , the online needs are
far greater. There is no more on-the-ground white board postings for
things to keep rolling.

People are not using the webcalendar at the OccupyPDX.org site. It
requires submission to the websteam, who do not publish in a timely
fashion. The webteam created  a purposefully disempowering method of
submissions for people and provided for no method of feedback, input
or accountability.

These were some of the reasons people chose to use white boards in
camp to begin with.

As you are probably aware, OP is in mass confusion from fast growth,
diaspora cause by the forced dispersing before communications networks
were in order, and the behemoth of a Democratic structure that
represents as individuals.

Thus,  people, who may or may not have regular web access, post events
and actions to a blind email list serve and not as Points of Contact
to the webteam - creating accountability and transparency - or better
yet to be able to post themselves as individuals.

This creates an unnecessary layer in what is already a mass cluster
cluck. We have over 60 areas of communications, for example, and stuff
is just not making it through to the website.

The real barriers are that the webteam at OP is committed to hierachy
of roles, and not usability of tools, et al.   It is  self-professed
experts in tech holding a bottle neck as a flow model, resulting in
artificial scarcity and closed system being run by a few with no
identity or two-way communications, let alone open communications to
the community.

 Portlandwiki is not an option either. The admins are talking
constantly about how they can't keep up, but not availing themselves
of  resources and insisting on arcane process. What passes for an
events calendar is a tedious and unwieldly high barrier-to-entry site.

The OP needs a calendar centralized and mobile, readily manageable
with low-barrier-to-entry skills, and with OS | OA Community for
questions and skill-building such as we have in Portland, but are not
able to take advantage of.

I hope I have not rambled to long and too widely for information to be
useful.

In summary>. Help. We need a calendar that is accessible, adoptable,
and utilizable without having to deal with people who would turn the
clock back 30 years to make themselves indispensable. The
Occupyportland calendar is close enough.  We need it. It needs only to
be part of the OccupyPortland website  ( and maybe not even that)  if
possible, and that god aweful hunk of flash crap with it's
unresponsive admins taken outta the loop.

Thank you for your time and kindness and what you ahve already given
us for a calendar. Now that I know, I will be promoting the crap outta
it.

On Oct 19, 9:34 pm, Matt Youell <m...@youell.com> wrote:

Teresa, you're a lot closer to some of this than I am. I'm just looking
at the existing (google) calendar on OccupyPortland, the "upcoming
events" wiki, and http://occupycalendar.org. Sigh.

Getting people to *switch* to the calagator version is probably going to
be difficult. Since Calagator is really designed to aggregate events
from multiple sources, it probably makes more sense to encourage them to
*add* it to their toolbox. Probably the most effective thing would be to
request that the occupyportland.org admins include a link to the
occupycalendar.org alongside the other calendars, and let the users
naturally migrate to what works best.

Here's where fanatical user(s) come into play: for any of these to
really be useful, someone needs to garden the content. For a calagator
instance, that means importing (or inputting) relevant events that you
see listed elsewhere, watching for spam and deleting it (if the site is
successful, the spam will come), and encouraging event organizers to
include the calagator in their promotional activities. It sounds as if
the main advantage of using a calagator in this case is that anyone who
cares can contribute, which doesn't seem to be the case for the google
calendar.

The better the quality and completeness of the data, the more likely the
tool will be embraced. I'm trying to help a little by going through the
venues that are there now and attaching addresses or lat/long to the
ones that lack them (where I can) -- and adding tags like "pdx,"
"seattle," "austin," "everywhere,"  etc. I don't see the tag cloud
popping up yet, and I hope that's just because not enough events and
venues are tagged. It seems critical to have a way for people to filter
by location on this site, and the tags would provide that.

Another thing that will help is for someone to watch the other relevant
calendars and transfer events into http://occupycalendar.org/. (I won't
keep up with it, I know.)

I've not been participating in the GA meetings or marches, so I would
not be the person to promote this. Possibly you are. Or, perhaps it
should just be allowed to spread (or not) organically. That's
essentially how Calagator.org became popular in the tech community --
fans promoted it, others found it useful and became fans, and so on.

I have to admit I've mostly been tracking what's happening (or coming
up) via twitter and Google+.

On 11/20/2011 04:36 PM, PDXsays wrote: