Generalising to non-osm

[harry-wood]

osmcal.org is looking rather good! We'll give it a try for our next OSMLondon meet-up. Looks like it'll rank pretty high among the events websites I've listed here: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mapping_Weekend_Howto#Publicity

Isn't it worth thinking about generalising this to other non-osm events? I imagine you must have thought about it.

By generalising I actually mean three different possibilities:

• Making a website AllKindsOfEventsCal.org instead of a osmcal.org Essentially launching a new competitor to meetup.com . That might sound daft, but I've been surprisingly dissatisfied by the various alternatives out there (see list above)
• Or just think about the codebase being deployable by other communities. e.g. If someone wanted to make a knittingcal.org for the global community of knitters, how hard would that be with this codebase? They'd have to clone the repo and rename everything. Change the colours. Maybe also do a different sign-up integration. How much of that could be just configuration?
• Combining the two ideas. Maybe if different communities deployed different instances of this codebase, they could be linked to eachother somehow. "Sorry there's no upcoming knitting meet-ups in your city, but check out this OpenStreetMap event on our sister site"

[thomersch]

I was afraid this issue would come some day ;)

From a technical perspective, opening up to other communities shouldn't be too complex. At the moment all the things are hardcoded to OSM (logo, colours, auth, ...), but making that configurable is certainly possible. Though, this could make maintenance harder, if people wish to tweak a lot of stuff, because I wouldn't want to break other people's setups when developing new features or changing any.

But then there is the operational side: Right now it is a wild west calendar. Anyone can edit, anyone can add stuff. I could imagine that other communities would prefer to restrict this, especially if I'd do allkindsofeventscal.org. Probably we'd need some moderation and policies in place. I'd really like to have such a calendar, but I am not sure whether I want to/can operate it. It would probably need either a business model or some long-term funding.

I was already thinking whether some kind of federated system could work: A community sets up some kind of calendar that has some kind of API (icalendar/rss/http+json or similar) and instances can be interlinked, so they exchange events. But that's just a technical idea without any concept for operation.

All of us want a better meetup.com, but I don't have any concrete ideas how to pull that off. Let's keep the conversation alive: I am willing to put work into a good idea, we just need to develop the concept further.

[thomersch]

An approach I'd want to try is a tag-based system: Every event can be added to one or more communities, with the default one being "OpenStreetMap". All "OpenStreetMap" events would be listed on the main feed.

So in case there is an OSM event happening in Belgium, I would add it to the communities "OpenStreetMap" and "OpenStreetMap Belgium", which would display it on the front page feed. Any events which are not relevant to global OSM could be added to only their respective communities, thus appearing in their feeds, but not in the global one.

That way communities could link or integrate their feeds and get only relevant events.

Does this make any sense, @harry-wood?

[ghost]

I think there are more things to discuss when considering Generalising to non-osm -- the main is OAuth authentication towards https://www.openstreetmap.org/. When events are added only with osm authentication, osmcal would stay OpenStreetMap related project.

My proposal is to close this issue with "I will not implement this" aka not going to generalize osmcal project and maybe re-open this issues when the time comes.

[thomersch]

This is a meta issue in my opinion that should stay open, so we can check whether future features match what we wanted here.