Let’s solve social event organising
October 1, 2024 — October 1, 2024
A weak spot of the contemporary social internet infrastructure: Scheduling events with friends, or potential friends.
Facebook has had an effective monopoly on this in the west, which I was not a fan of. But maybe it was better than the current situation where nothing works.
1 Running excellent events
Everyone — including you! — should host more events (with Nick Gray)
If one must do it online, try Priya Parker’s Together Apart Podcast.
2 Tools
2.1 Partiful
“Do one thing and do it well.” Earnest, cute, low-feature invite service. Free.
2.2 Luma
Luma:
Slightly nerdier full-featured service that can integrate into fancy software and such.
2.3 Mixily
We created Mixily in 2019 because we had a vision for a better way to host events. Mixily started as an event hosting platform that allows the sending of invitations, collection of rsvps, and selling of tickets. […]
Imagine a world in which you can easily set-up and host events, find a convenient day for all parties involved, and make the event look exactly like you want with simple and stylish design.
2.4 Meetup
Meetup is for thematic, regular community discovery things. It’s OK for that, but it is annoying that it keeps trying to sell me wine vouchers.
2.5 Facebook events
Still works even for people who don’t use Facebook. It’s still feeding the Meta Social Graph Moloch, though, many facebook-deniers will refuse to use it (including, sometimes, me).
3 Incoming
Calagator is an open source community calendar platform written in Ruby on Rails that runs calagator.org, a Portland tech calendar. Think open-source-meetup.
GigTripper is an online gig booking platform, built specifically for the Australian Live Music Industry. We uniquely focus on a solution to improve the process of booking live music gigs for independent artists, primarily (but not limited to) those early in their career.
calndr.link creates calendar links.
I built calndr.link after I had multiple clients request the exact same thing — a simple and easy way to generate calendar links, for adding to their website or in email newsletters.
There’s a few existing providers out there, but they’re extremely pricey for what they do — take some basic data (title/date/etc) and reformat it into a url for a calendar provider (be it google or apple).