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

[MarkDilley]

Wondering if folks in the tech community here would be interested in
working with me on this. (me no skilz)

Best, Mark

http://PortlandWiki.org/OccupyPortland

[Reid Beels]

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

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[Mark Dilley]

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.

[r baxter]

Hey Mark,
If you are maybe just fishing for some tech advice/support, I'm
totally down - email me off list; I can at least give some
knowledgeable feedback. Stoked that such stuff is happening now,
though I haven't been following it too closely yet.
Cheers,
Roby

On Sat, Oct 1, 2011 at 3:54 PM, MarkDilley <markw...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Reid Beels]

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

Cheers,

Reid

[Matt Youell]

On 10/12/11 10:36 PM, Reid Beels wrote:
> Glad to see this came together. :) Let us know if you run into any
> interesting issues running it.
>

One thing that came up though was the Google Maps API. Are there any
plans to upgrade to Google Maps API v3?

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

[Igal Koshevoy]

On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 1:51 AM, Matt Youell <ma...@youell.com> wrote:
> On 10/12/11 10:36 PM, Reid Beels wrote:
> One thing that came up though was the Google Maps API. Are there any plans
> to upgrade to Google Maps API v3?

[...]

> 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.

I really wish that were true, but unfortunately the v3 API still
requires an API key for geocoding addresses, which is very important
to us.

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

[Igal Koshevoy]

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

On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 1:51 AM, Matt Youell <ma...@youell.com> wrote:
> On 10/12/11 10:36 PM, Reid Beels wrote:

> One thing that came up though was the Google Maps API. Are there any plans
> to upgrade to Google Maps API v3?

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.

At the Ruby Beginners' meetup, Rafa pointed out that the "Geocoder" library provides modern Geocoding <http://railscasts.com/episodes/273-geocoder?view=asciicast> and that the "gmaps4rails" library provides Google v3 maps <https://github.com/apneadiving/Google-Maps-for-Rails>. 

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 

[lin...@activatepdx.org]

Hi guys! 

 

Robby and Mark - I have been talking about creating an activist calendar the past several months, and have a pair of developers beginning to really work on it.  We could totally use your help!  We expect it to go way beyond just Occupy, and way beyond just Portland, when complete.  We are using Calagator as a base, have implemented a Full Calendar widget and expect to add faceted filtering, so users can sort by Organization Name, Neighborhood, Topics (climate change, human rights, economy, health care, etc) or sort by Event Type (protest, documentary screening, debate, etc).   You can read a bit about it at www.activatepdx.org.   I also expect to have a team meeting early next week, so if you want to hear what we are up to and get involved, that could be a great intro.  E-mail me if you want to join us!!   lin...@activatepdx.org

[Matt Youell]

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

Hi guys! 

 

Robby and Mark - I have been talking about creating an activist calendar the past several months, and have a pair of developers beginning to really work on it.  We could totally use your help!  We expect it to go way beyond just Occupy, and way beyond just Portland, when complete.  We are using Calagator as a base, have implemented a Full Calendar widget and expect to add faceted filtering, so users can sort by Organization Name, Neighborhood, Topics (climate change, human rights, economy, health care, etc) or sort by Event Type (protest, documentary screening, debate, etc).   You can read a bit about it at www.activatepdx.org.   I also expect to have a team meeting early next week, so if you want to hear what we are up to and get involved, that could be a great intro.  E-mail me if you want to join us!!   lin...@activatepdx.org

See http://occupycalendar.org

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

[Igal Koshevoy]

On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 3:19 PM, <lin...@activatepdx.org> wrote:
> We are using Calagator as a base

Please, please, please contribute as many of your changes back as
generalized, well-tested code so we can incorporate them into the
official Calagator source code. This will let more people befit from
the code and ensure that someone other than you is maintaining this as
Calagator evolves.

> have implemented a Full Calendar widget

That was one of the first things we built and threw away. A full
calendar view doesn't work if you have more than a handful of events
because the resulting view is either not viewable at low resolution,
or can't show all your events, or can't show the full name of the
event, or is a pain to navigate.

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.

> and expect to add faceted
> filtering, so users can sort by Organization Name, Neighborhood, Topics
> (climate change, human rights, economy, health care, etc) or sort by Event
> Type (protest, documentary screening, debate, etc).

Isn't that what the tags already do? E.g. add a link on your homepage
that goes to the "economy" tag and add the "economy" tag to
appropriate events.

-igal

[Igal Koshevoy]

On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 3:59 PM, Matt Youell <ma...@youell.com> wrote:
> See http://occupycalendar.org
>
> 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.

This could be popular, but requires significant social effort to
succeed. Normal people care about content -- not wiki-editable
calendar concepts or some particular vendor's widgets. You need to
become a fanatical user and find some like minded folks to fill this
calendar with content, or visitors will leave immediately after seeing
"no events". If you and your maintainers aren't enthusiastic about
adding content, no one else will catch on. Once you have some minimum
amount of content, talk with event organizers, spread the word, pass
cards at rallies, put up fliers, etc. Simply putting up a website
isn't enough. :)

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

This is something I'd like to see as part of the Calagator source
code. Please either contribute this or work with us at code sprints to
build this.

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

[Matt Youell]

On 10/19/11 5:08 PM, Igal Koshevoy wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 3:59 PM, Matt Youell<ma...@youell.com> wrote:
>> See http://occupycalendar.org

>> <snip>

> This could be popular, but requires significant social effort to
> succeed. Normal people care about content -- not wiki-editable
> calendar concepts or some particular vendor's widgets. You need to
> become a fanatical user and find some like minded folks to fill this
> calendar with content, or visitors will leave immediately after seeing
> "no events". If you and your maintainers aren't enthusiastic about
> adding content, no one else will catch on. Once you have some minimum
> amount of content, talk with event organizers, spread the word, pass
> cards at rallies, put up fliers, etc. Simply putting up a website
> isn't enough. :)

Yeah, that's understood. In this particular case the Occupy cause is
something I'm somewhat sympathetic to but not passionate about, so I was
content to complete the technical piece and let others do the advocacy
bit. I don't know how that effort went, but it apparently hasn't been
fanatical enough to garner attention. I know that Calagator itself took
a long while to really catch on and for a broad base of people to
understand it. So even with fanatical effort it is a long-term process.

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

[PDXsays]

There is need and attention for #OccupyPortland calendaring, and this
calagator based template - despite it's geo issues - is the best
thing yet.

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:
> On 10/19/11 5:08 PM, Igal Koshevoy wrote:> On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 3:59 PM, Matt Youell<m...@youell.com>  wrote:
> >> Seehttp://occupycalendar.org

[Amy K. Farrell]

Hi,

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+.