1. Events in Keene, NH: Spring 2005

2. Events in Keene, NH: Summer 2009 Built on Microsoft Azure Data flows in from: Eventful.com Upcoming.org A curated list of iCalendar “feeds” Data flows out to: HTML, XML, JSON, iCalendar Not a database Not a destination site A syndication hub

3. Actually, a growing collection of hubs

4. Topical hubs for virtual communities

5. Core Values Open data Transparency Reuse Collaboration Shared responsibility for curation Respect for authoritative sources Standards

6. Core Principles Two-way syndication Structured data Tagging conventions Services ecosystem Emergent workflow Computational thinking for everyone

7. From groupware to social information management 2009 iCal RFC2445 1999 NNTP RFC 977 “It was one of the books I'm proudest of publishing, despite its commercial failure. It was just too far ahead of its time.” - Tim O’Reilly, Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invented Today?Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invented Today? elmcity ? outcomeyearstandardproject

8. publishsubscribeaggregate RSS Radio UserLand NetNewsWire Bloglines Google Reader Many others Netscape Radio UserLand Meerkat Bloglines Technorati Planet Many others Radio UserLand TypePad WordPress Many others ICS Calagator elmcity Others? Google Calendar Outlook Apple iCal Live Calendar Drupal Others Google Calendar Outlook Apple iCal Live Calendar Others RSS feeds, iCalendar feeds

9. The standard is 10 years old! But it was late to the personal publishing party. It only recently become possible to publish an iCalendar “feed” using: Google Calendar Outlook Apple iCal Drupal And hardly anybody knows this. Why iCalendar? Why now?

10. Right thing: Feed. Wrong way: RSS. The date and time must be here, right? Wrong. It’s nowhere to be found. (RSS link just points back to page)

11. Bookmarking metadata in Delicious Step 1: Designate a Delicious account e.g.: prescottaz, for Prescott, Arizona Step 2: Bookmark a metadata URL e.g.: http://delicious.com/prescottaz/metadata Step 3: Tag it with location, timezone

12. … are also controlled in Delicious Other metadata defaults… tz=Eastern title=event+calendar contact=nobody_yet img=http://elmcity.info/media/img/keene-night-360.jpg css=http://jonudell.net/css/elmcity.css template=http://jonudell.net/tmpl_events.tmpl radius=5

13. Bookmarking feeds in Delicious

14. http://delicious.com/elmcity/trusted+ics+feed Default event URL and category. (Individual events often don’t provide, will inherit, can augment.)

15. Other possible ways to curate metadata Fielded Wiki? {{ElmcityAggregator |where=keene,nh |tz=Eastern |radius=15 |title=Events in and Around Keene }} Semantic wiki? Goal: Support any source of name/value pairs that people will happily use.

16. Open infrastructure

17. Collaborating in FriendFeed

18. Where do iCalendar feeds come from? Sometimes curators create them. Sometimes curators can find them. In RSS terms, the iCalendar ecosystem is at roughly a 2001 stage of development.

19. Guerilla feed creation: Light up hidden feeds Google Calendar Most Drupal sites. Some library systems. Assorted other content management systems. A variety of popular web calendars do offer ICS feeds, including: The operators of these systems typically won’t know that. Curators can bring this hidden feeds to light. Just by bookmarking them!

20. Guerilla feed creation: FuseCal

21. DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20090704 BEGIN:VEVENT URL:http://www.stonewallfarm.org/events.html Guerilla feed creation: FuseCal Most calendar info online is HTML only. FuseCal finds titles, dates and times. And exports ICS.

22. Guerilla feed creation: MySpace 1. Visit myspace.com/lonesomelake 2. Open the all events link: http://collect.myspace.com....69161&n=lonesome+lake 3. Give it to FuseCal 4. Filter the results by Keene 5. Export the iCalendar URL 6. Add that URL to the Delicioushttp://collect.myspace.com....69161&n=lonesome+lake registry with these tags: trusted ics feed url=http://fusecal.com/calendar/ical/4001823?h3-00163e2867e6 category=music Now, even though MySpace does not export ICS, or do location query, we have this band's Keene events flowing through the hub.http://fusecal.com/calendar/ical/4001823?h3-00163e2867e6

23. Oops

24. Guerilla feed creation: Finding implicit recurring events and making them explicit 1. Robot searches Google and Bing for: {every|first|second|third|fourth|last} {monday|tuesday|wednesday|thursday|friday|saturday|sunday} keene,nh 2. Curator eyeballs results looking for recurring events 3. Sample result text, from a PDF file: NSD – 2009_02_Issue.indd Recreation Center, 312 Washington St., Keene, NH. Western Style Square Dance Apparel ….. “We have a dance every first and third Saturday, no matter what!!!” 4. Actual source of date/time info 5. Implied recurring event made explicit

25. Downstream syndication to the web

26. Syndication to community cable TV

27. Chess club High school principal Traveling minstrel Square dancers True stories

28. Chess club: Right time, wrong place Keene Sentinel: Monday night chess club, 6:30 PM, Best Western Hotel Eventful.com: Monday night chess club, 6:30 PM, E.F. Lane Hotel Nope. It moved. The chess club does not expect to be the authoritative producer of a feed about itself. The newspaper does not expect to consume such a feed. Both expectations need to change.

29. High school: “We posted weekly.pdf to the website. Isn’t that good enough?”

30. Communications Committee, Tuesday at 5:30, Cheshire Career Center Conference Room, KHS DTSTART:20080617T173000 SUMMARY:Communications Committee LOCATION:KHS, Cheshire Career Center Conference Room PDF ICS The difference matters. Our educators need to understand it. And then teach it. Computational thinking

31. More computational thinking Indirection: Please don't give me a copy of your information. Give me a link to it instead, so I can respect your authority. Syndication: Your HTML and PDF pages won't flow through the syndication network. Your iCalendar feed will. Structure: If you make me guess the date and time, I'll guess wrong. Abstraction: We can use any URL as a rendezvous for social information management. We can even invent imaginary ones just for this purpose. Query Q: Which Eventful venues are feeding into the Providence hub? A: http://delicious.com/mashablecity/venue=eventful Q: What are the government-related feeds for Prescott? A: http://delicious.com/prescottaz/category=government Q: Where is music happening in Huntington? A: http://elmcity.cloudapp.net/services/whyhuntington/html/music

32. “Lohan may have been bored, but she wasn’t dumb. She tagged E! correspondent Ben Lyons and gossip blogger Perez Hilton in the photo’s caption.” http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/2009/06/17/2009-06- 7_lindsay_lohan_posts_topless picture_on_twitter.html Lindsay Lohan posts topless picture on Twitter Computational thinking in the mainstream

33. Because Keene’s aggregator subscribes to Eventful events in Keene, Beau appeared on the calendar – without effort, without even realizing it. What if the other 20 cities on his tour were listening to their channels? Minstrel: Beau Bristow in Keene

34. I’m looking to partner with: Newspapers Libraries Schools More info: http://elmcity.cloudapp.net http://delicious.com/judell/elmcity+azure jonu@microsoft.com