A few years ago it occurred to me that something that would really benefit my town would be a local events calendar. I'd seen larger communities with them, and I thought it would be great if it was easy to tell what was going on here, too. There were a few different calendars run by a few different organizations, but no one place to go.
As I thought about the problem, it quickly became clear that running a community calendar is hard. Someone - usually an already-busy volunteer - has to track down events, type them up, and keep them current when a venue changes or a date is cancelled.
Being a software developer, I thought I could do something about the sheer amount of work involved. I thought I could both come up with a system that was much less time-intensive, and provide the public with something that would show them what was going on in their own backyard.
It took a couple of iterations, but what I came up with is Pavillion.
The key idea is this: the people who run community calendars are curators. They shouldn't be in the business of typing up or maintaining calendar listings.
The event organizers themselves are the most invested in their own events, so they should have a calendar of their own for all of their events. The library has one. The farmers market has one. The theater has one. Then the community curator follows those calendars and reposts events to the community calendar, social media style. Updates and cancellations stay with the event owner as the person who knows the most about what is going on. Those updates then flow through to every calendar that reposted the event.
There's more, of course:
Privacy. Anyone can look at a public calendar without an account and without being tracked.
Multilingual support for multilingual communities. Events can be written in more than one language.
Built with people who use screen readers in mind. The event and location forms also have a place for organizers to say how people with accessibility needs can get them met.
Open source and distributed so communities aren't beholden to a corporation for essential social infrastructure. Anyone can run their own copy for their own community. Calendars on different servers can follow each other, using ActivityPub, the same protocol behind Mastodon.
Only a few calendars are using Pavillion so far. That's where you come in.
If you run events and want an easy and beautiful way to publish them, or if you want to see your community have its own community calendar, I'd love to have you try Pavillion. If you're a developer and want a project to tinker with, check out the code on GitHub and get in touch.
This is my project to strengthen communities, and I'd love as many people as possible to join me on this journey.