Towards a National Activist Calendar

Currently a bunch of organizations have their own website calendars. These generally include their own events, and sometimes events organized by allies. Quality and format varies.

There are also several websites that try to have a calendar that covers their geographical area (city or state), an issue, the US, another country, or even the world.

Most of the significant activist events (eg. conference level, not just a weekly group meeting) are located on organizational websites. They don't make it on to the "calendar" websites, like CampusActivism.org/ActivismNetwork.org.

Thus while we could work to get "calendar" websites (like wiserearth.org, campusactivism.org, and protest.net) to share information - the larger piece of the puzzle requires us to get at the underpublicized events.

One of the things I've started doing is collecting a list of activist conferences that happen once a year, along with a website, general location, time of year, and organization that puts them on. As regular annual conferences make up a large percent of all conferences, having a publicly editable database of these conferences would be a good step towards building a comprehensive national events calendar.

You could also have a list of groups that regularly organize conference using other time frames. For instance, within the US student movement several organizations organize regional conferences that may be either in the fall or spring. A small number of organizations hold their main conferences every two years.

You could also get volunteers to regularly check these organization's website to see if they are holding a conference, and then store the date and username of the person who last checked them. Or you could get an official volunteer from the organization to be responsible for keeping their events listed. Also you could have an automated system that would tell them how to add their conference (though this requires have an updated email contact for the organization - whch is tricky as the contact can frequently change), or a form email that can be sent out to a customized email address.

Another piece of the puzzle is publicizing the result. People aren't going to care about being on the calendar unless tens of thousands of people are using it.