One thing that has been planned for a long while is an open science calendar where anyone can easily add and modify events without bothering with long sign-up procedures. Some user stories for this are:
I’m interested in open science and I want to find out if there is a local meetup happening near me and when/where it is.
I’m interested in training courses to help me practice open science and I want to find out when various organisations are running them.
I have a great open science project/tool that I’d like to present and I’d like to see all the upcoming conferences without having to look on every organisation’s website.
I’m running an event and I want to advertise it to the rest of the open science community really easily.
I’m attending an event and I want to advertise it to the rest of the open science community really easily.
Desired features:
List and edit events with minimal sign-up requirments
Do people have an opinion on which of these options might work better? Also any thoughts on feasibility of encouraging people to use such a calendar would be encouraged. I hope that we could get at least a few larger organisation loading their events into it and things would grow from there…
Hello, I’m the author of the OpenACalendar software.
This idea of a community of people working together to share knowledge of events is exactly the use case it was written for, so we really hope we can help. The event data generated is Open Data and can be reused in other places to!
There is a demo site at https://demo.hasacalendar.co.uk/ - please feel free to make an account and add some test events to see how it works.
there is still the open science google calendar, i created with a friend last year. maybe this is still helpful, but I think a new plattform would fit better to the requirements.
it has an own google script with a form behind to add events. here the links, dont know if they work:
I would eventually like to see JSON-LD which is included in Portable Linked Profiles included in some way. Linked data allows data from one website to be used on another. This would mean that data could be pulled from external sites [1]. An added bonus would be that this would set a collision course with open badges from the badge alliance to illustrate accomplishments [2] which could as a side affect create greater collaboration with mozilla’s open science [3].
[1] What is JSON-LD? What is JSON-LD? - YouTube
[2] (look for We’re adapting Open Badges to JSON-LD from Nate Otto)
[3] http://mozillascience.org/mozilla-science-lab-week-in-review-oct-6-oct-12/
Very quick reply as I’m heading out the door - We already have JSON and I would be happy to add JSON-LD later. I’ve spoken to peple about Linked Data before. I’ll have a proper look at those links and reply more later.
So re-reading your comment I’m not sure I follow exactly actually, but let me cover some points.
Importing events - we can import events from other sources. We need a good clean data source with events from one group only, and that turns out to be really hard to find!
Open data for exporting events - we have several open data feeds, some web widgets and a WordPress plugin and I can point you to examples of all of these already being used.
In both cases, we support several different common data formats and we’d be happy to look at adding more.
Google Calendar - this software actually came from a real world use case that was using Google Calendar and as it grew that turned out not to be suitable! I use it for my personal calendar and we aren’t trying to beat that, but for a group of people working together to share knowledge of personal events we hope we are a pretty good fit. We make sure many people can add data easily and safely, you can import data from others and the resulting data can be filtered and reused in various ways.
I like that you have the ability to export and import data so it is not a closed platform. On your group page you describe:
"Collaborative Calendar for groups or societies, or people with a shared interest
This collaborative calendar lets the people in a group or organisation, or simply people who share a common interest, work together to list all the events they find interesting.
Every community can have their own space, to list and browse the events that interest them.
A community can choose to have their space editable by anyone like a wiki, or only allow certain users to edit it.
A full history of all edits is kept so you can let many people edit the calendar
without worrying about data loss.
Your community, your data. You can export all your events into many other calendar systems indent preformatted text by 4 spaces"
This is something that can be done now.
I’m partial to linked data having been around it and wanting to build a project with it, but it’s still in the experimental stage. I like that it allows you to give unique URIs to pieces of data and use them with other pieces of data at other URIs. It seems that that keeping things clean is kind of hard. The w3c recommendation for the Linked Data Platform provides some solutions I think. Editing data provides some challenges as there are some security and indentity issues around it from what I can gather. Not sure what the community wants. Thanks for putting some time into it. FWIW, I found a Linked Data calendar online at GitHub - rww-apps/ld-cal: Linked Data Calendar and an online instance at https://ld-cal.rww.io/index.html#.
I am not sure about edit history with ld-cal…you might be able to do it with R&WBase (another experimental project). Not sure where they are at.
So I’m interested in adding any stable useful format of data exporting to Open Tech Calendar. We already have various API’s and a micro-format built in, for instance.
Linked Data is interesting, but I would want to work closely with some users to work out the best way to mark up our data and deal with issues like linking back to the original source of imported events. From looking at the ld-cal source code, Event Ontology seems like a good place to start discussions, if that’s still the standard.
I tried to look at ld-cal, but couldn’t get a working sample up. From a quick look at the source, it doesn’t look like it has edit history, or any of the more useful features like exporting to the more conventional iCAL format that makes the data useful to most people.
Thanks for the suggestion Mitar! I’m trying out HasACalendar for Open Knowledge group events. I feel like for open science calagator could work nicely, they both have slightly different features.
Slight glitch is that we don’t really have sysadmin capacity to quickly install, set up and maintain this on the Open Knowledge infrastructure, but we could
Find somewhere to host an instance and try it out. We could try asking if Open Knowledge Labs if they could give us space on a server http://okfnlabs.org/.
Find a solution using WordPress as we already have this running and maintained. Event Manager http://wp-events-plugin.com/ allows frontend submission of events with no log in requirement, but it doesn’t have the import features of calagator. There are a few other plugin options and I’d be happy to pull together some options.
Anything that integrates with WordPress we can get up and running on Open Knowledge servers relatively quickly (so long as it’s not super-complicated) anything else will take longer. Might be worth thinking about the features needed? I would say:
Ability to import feeds from other sites
Ability for users to easily submit and edit events
Tags
Calendar and map view
It would be great to come up with a solution that would also be useful for other groups e.g. OpenGLAM, but I’m equally keen to get something up and running soon as long as the data can be transferred easily as and when a better solution comes up!
Event Manager would be our best pick because it’s a WordPress plugin and also it gives a nice clean looks with the features that are needed. I’m willing, along with the FeedPress, to get this plugin in place and going.
I’ve added the plugin to my WordPress instance and found a potential way of importing external feeds, which is currently missing as standard:
Anyone interested in trying to make this work? Happy to allow you access as necessary. It would be good to get the configuration right before asking the sysadmins to install on Open Knowledge servers.
Thanks for pointing this out! I have sent an email.
I think this shows there is interest in this. OpenACalendar can certainly offer tech advances over just using Google Calendar as they are doing (many people editing, being able to filter by country and other useful things) but at the end of the day it’s about the community and how they find it best to work with this type of data. Happy to chat to anyone about these kinds of projects!