Activist Calender

A proposal for an online Aotearoa activist calender system and some suggestions for setting it up.

The Aotearoa.Indymedia.org (AIM) website was relaunched earlier this year with new features provided by a new software codebase called DadaIMC (http://dadaimc.org/). Some users may have noticed the absence of the events calender it used to have which was part of the Active software (http://www.active.org.au/doc/) which used to power the site.

As a result of this the open-publishing newswire (http://indymedia.org.nz/newswire/index.php) on the AIM site is being used for announcements about upcoming events. This is ok but it does tend to confuse the related but separate roles of media activist reporting tool and protest organising tool. In practice the proliferation of short announcement articles displaces other articles which fulfill the primary functions of the newswire:

- to gather coverage of political happenings from a variety of sources
- to gather further information about the issues behind them
- to gather commentary and opinions on those events and issues

In my opinion the activist movement of Aotearoa needs an open, user-friendly online calendering system which could be linked from AIM and users encouraged to put information about upcoming events onto that rather than the newswire. It also seems to me it would be more useful to have separate calenders for each city where there are enough activist groups and events to warrant it. There are a number of ways to go about this.

The DadaIMC creators did not include a calender module as they maintain a separate radical events calender site (http://radicalendar.org) which AIM used to have it's calender hosted on when we set up our first ever test site back in 2001. One option is to request 5 calenders from them; one for Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin. These calenders could also be created on Protest.net using the process documented here (http://protest.net/create_calendar.html). There seems to be a NZ calender on there already but it is not being used and as discussed above a NZ-side calender is probably not that useful (http://protest.net/NZ/calendrome.cgi).

A second possibility is to use the Active software, which was originally designed for this purpose before it was adapted for use in the fledgling Indymedia project in 1999. There are Active sites for a number of Australian cities including Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth http://www.active.org.au/. I don't know what the process is for becoming part of the Active network (which could provide hosting) but I know the Catalyst collective provide hosting for the existing Active sites http://www.cat.org.au/. Alternatively an Aoteroa-based network could be formed with it's own name and logo and a host found to run each needed iteration of the Active software (which is free and libre). Either way it would take a coalition of activists from each area to agree on the need for an Active site and take responsibility for encouraging other activist to use it.

Another more long term option is to create a calender using an Aotearoa-based activist host like Enzyme(http://enzyme.org.nz). This could be designed to allow people to enter their own events into a calender on their own site with an RSS feed (or similiar system) to allow all the events to be gathered together on one site. The information on that site could then be searched by locale, issue or whatever is useful to the user, so an activist could search for every event in the country on GE over a particular month for example, or every event in their locale over a certain week.

It would be great to get some feedback on which of these options people think they'd find easiest and most useful. If anyone can offer time or resources to help make any of them possible please post a comment or email me - strypey@indymedia.org.