Is there anyone working on similar idea like "Reducing Loneliness With Open Event Data"?

Working Groups Open Health
#1

Is there anyone working on similar idea like “Reducing Loneliness With Open Event Data”?

Social loneliness caused by the lack of a social network can be reduced by making use of information about events happening around us. An internet based service is needed to help lonely people with matching interests to meet each other.

Centrally managed open event data improves the probability of people with similar interests to find each other. This national internet service will provide event data (what-where-when) in a mutually agreed data model for other services to make use of via public APIs under an open license. Open event data makes it possible to develop further services using the data, i.e. a service with which users can subscribe to notifications on upcoming events based on their own criteria.

There is more information and pictures about idea on Kokeilun Paikka website:
Reducing Loneliness With Open Event Data

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#2

Interesting idea.

However, in my experience, finding good accurate event Open Data is very difficult. Groups running events will even at times publish wrong information and not update their own websites!

So I think your idea needs to work on “where will this data come from”.

Also, I think you need to work on scope. You talk about a central managed store, but do you have a definition of what events are welcome? What if an extreme hate group started adding events saying they tackled loneliness - how what that be handled?

In my experience, local places tend to have their own solutions - look at any big city, and there will be some local publication or social media account curating events, usually be hand. Is it possible to build on that?

Sorry to be down - I think it’s a problem worth tackling and I’m happy to chat about my experiences if you think that would help!

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#3

Completely agree that scope is important. The data elements or taxonomy is just as important. Different things are important to different groups so its hard to make this work for everyone. Completely open/accurate event data is impossible but it certainly should be easier than it currently is. My company is curating event data relevant to our clients/partners, so I’d be happy to share my experiences in this noble pursuit!

#4

Interesting. I do not see why not. If education has changed to the point where most young adults learn remotely. Nothing to keep those individuals from getting a Sense of community remotely.

Problem will be keeping up the Infrastructure

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#5

The first pilot could be to build a national web service for event data, which allows Finnish libraries to report events where unknown people can find people interested in the same thing. For example, a senior citizen may ask the library staff to add a gaming event where chess players will face.

In Finland we have lot of public libraries.

All Finnish cities and municipalities have a municipal or city library. At libraries you can borrow books, read magazines and newspapers, use a computer, study or participate in various events.
Some libraries may also have childrens’ games or host story hours.
Most libraries usually have a reading room. This is a quiet space suitable for reading and doing your homework in silence, for example.
The library staff can also help you in using a computer, and some libraries host language cafés where you can practise speaking Finnish.

Tavastia Events is a web service for event data management, whose source codes are available under an open license (MIT license). The platform code could be utilized for this purpose.
https://github.com/HAMKSmartServices/TavastiaEvents

#6

I had a quick look at TavastiaEvents.

I’m very curious how well their UI/UX for adding reoccurring events works. Reoccurring events are a problem for data accuracy because people will set up a reoccurring event and then never check it, so the event could stop, change, or have special exceptions to the rule but your data set will still have the old data. (On Open Tech Calendar, we only let events recur for 6 months to try and stop this). At the same time, reoccurring events are crucial - if someone knows of a weekly Chess club, for instance, they aren’t going to fill out a long form like this time and time again for each week! In TavastiaEvents you select dates by hand rather than by the more usual rule - I wonder how far in advance people tend to add events? Do they email people to ask for updates as the run comes to an end (Open Tech Calendar does), and how well does that work?

Also, I couldn’t see a way to import events other than by getting a programmer to write something custom against there REST API. If you use this, I would recommend that is the first thing you try and build out. We import a lot from other sources and having a simple options here helps - people don’t like adding the same data twice!

I am much more interested in https://dev.hel.fi/projects/linked-events/ , linked from the about page. It looks like they have got a reasonable amount of event data flowing around between data stores, and I’m very curious how well that works. It also says “Linked Events was developed to be the national event data standard in The Six City Strategy.” Do you know more about that?

@jordanhauer4 I would be very interested to hear more about the methods you use at your work!

#7

We have built our own proprietary event taxonomy, which works well for our industry (anything related to data or investment managers). But we are definitely interested in utilizing some best practices and open taxonomies/ontologies used elsewhere.

In terms of how we gather that information, we have been collecting based on news/updates that mention events and then manually going to those events websites and curating the information we have about them. We will eventually allow the event organizers to edit that information (once we focus on developing that) through an online form.

Let me know if you want to discuss further

#8

Please check https://6aika.fi/in-english/ for the Six City Strategy info. There is also Harmonised
Smart City APIs Cook Book for Cities https://www.citysdk.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/CookBook_web_v1.1.pdf