Introduction to PlaceCal

22nd June 2017

Dr Kim Foale, Geeks for Social Change

Im going to talk about PlaceCal our community-sourced events calendar

that were really excited about and I hope some of you have heard of. First
though Im going to talk about how we got to this point, as our approach to
developing this has proven to be as important as the nal result, and weve
done a lot of work along the way we want to share.

As I hope you know, Manchester Age Friendly Neighbourhoods are working in

four areas of Manchester to make them better places to be for people over 50.
A key research nding was that older people thought there was very little to
do in their areas.

The MAFN team went to lots of venues and talked to lots of organisations to
nd out what events they were putting on. It turned out there was actually a
lot going on in all four areas.

Figure 1: Google Calendar screenshot

We collated these onto four Google Calendars. As you can see theres a huge
amount on.

Given there are so many events, why is there a perception there isnt much to
do by older people in the areas we were working in?

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Current situation
We identied a few problem areas that were causing this from discussions
with organisations, residents, and the teams existing community
management experience.

Problem 1. A general lack of aordable training and support for small

organisations. Community organisations often lack dedicated technical sta
and are used to seeing technology as a problem that they dont really have the
resources to deal with, rather than an opportunity to work more eciently.

Problem 2. Organisations are used to operating in siloed ways working in

parallel rather than in unison. Many organisations produce their own
promotional material as an occasional yer or poster, but dont work with
other organisations to promote their events together. Social media sites like
Facebook and Twitter dont help at all to rectify this.

Problem 3. Theres a lack of regional support and strategy helping

organisations promote their event data together. Big organisations like
universities tend to be more focussed on their own research impact agendas,
and City Council or housing association solutions tend to be managed and
run by sta working for them, not community organisations themselves.

Using a place/health approach to

community technology
To tackle these issues we started adapting the same place/health approach
were talking about today, but applying it to technology.

Getting universities and tech companies working together is hard enough

already, and adding community organisations into the mix gives us three
extremely dierent social elds with their own sets of requirements and
success criteria.

Weve started writing up our methodology behind this Community

Technology Partnerships. Our interventions are examples of this
methodology, and we can provide more information if you wish after the

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event. Ill show this approach in practice and how its turned into PlaceCal.

Intervention 1 - Skills audit

Figure 2: CTP Audit

Theres a real lack of information about community organisations technical

capacity, skills, facilities and training. Despite the huge push for people to use
technology, we dont really have a feeling for the situation on the ground.

Were conducting a survey of the community organisations were working

with to nd out where they are at technically, where we need to get them to
to be able to use their data for PlaceCal (were coming to that in a moment),
and if theres anything else we can provide to improve the areas capability
in keeping with our overall ABCD approach.

Our preliminary ndings are:

Smaller organisations have a skills decit, often struggling with a basic web
presence. Larger organisations often have dedicated IT support services
Big Life and One Manchester, for example, but often no dedicated
communications sta.

All organisations feel pushed to use services like Facebook and Twitter, but
dont really have the time or inclination to use them and dont see much
benet from them.

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 Everyone we spoke to saw a lot of benet in the PlaceCal concept.
Automated yer and poster production especially was a big hit (more about
that later).

Organisations generally were all on the lookout for more volunteers and/or
transport in a variety of categories.

If you have time today and want to get involved wed love to talk to you. Were
hoping to publish the ndings from this as a piece of independent research to
share with you all.

Intervention 2 - Training and Support

The vast majority of technical products have little or no interest in training
actual people, and no interest in supporting anything other than their app
itself.

We wanted to expand the service oer were delivering and really give people
the support and training they need to use it condently, creating
better-connected communities using existing technology rst, before adding
our own functions on top of it. PlaceCals methodology is to rst get people
publishing a calendar of events, and then build on that infrastructure base,
rather than expecting people to learn something new.

To do this were working with Manchester City Council to develop both

training materials, we have a project support worker. We see this as essential
to delivering the project. Stephen is the rst of what were hoping are many
Calendar Secretaries paid sta working in an area to active engage
organisations to publish their event information. Stephens role is to work
with groups to understand their need, help them publish their events, and aid
promoting the bigger regional events and generally helping to de-silo the
current situation.

Were still working on the implementation of this as were in the early stages,
but hope to have a complete plan published soon that others can use in their
own areas.

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Intervention 3 - Software intervention -
PlaceCal
So, on to the product itself PlaceCal!

As mentioned, its a community-sourced geolocated events calendar.

Hopefully this extended preamble makes sense now we see it not just as a
technical product but a spatial intervention enabling people and organisations
to work better together. This method drastically reduces the eventual
workload on anyone who would maintain a top-down system. It also means
that others can utilise the event data as they wish too so theres multiple
benets to a range of actors before we even start building software.

PlaceCal Overview
Key Features
Geolocated. For older people, hyper-local events are really important, maybe
even within 1km.

Community-sourced. As mentioned, its really key that its updated by

community organisations themselves with the least stress possible.

Designed for a range of outputs. Designed for web and phone and brochures
and posters and yers and

How it works
Google Calendar, Outlook, Facebook and Mac Calendar all allow making
calendars public using something called an iCal or .ics feed. This is similar
to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) but for events its a structured data
format that allows us to syndicate events feeds.

Our software takes all these feeds and adds in extra information about the
venue, such as tags, travel information, general, and eventually things like
logos and extra images for special events.

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Figure 3: PlaceCal preview home page

Figure 4: PlaceCal preview event detail

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 Figure 5: PlaceCal preview venue view

This database of events unlocks a number of outputs.

Centralised geolocated web calendar

Firstly of course the web calendar weve got some sketches to show you
after this talk. The primary use case is based on showing people the nearest
events and event venues in a small radius of their home address.

Were hoping to make this emphasise areas more than existing blast
template approaches allow, creating specic identities for each of the areas
as well.

Creation of printed events brochures

A lot of people using this will have little or no internet use. Were therefore
looking to create automated printable brochures that people working in
libraries, community centres and other buildings can provide for people.

This means that if people tell us their postcode, we can print o a brochure of

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 Figure 6: PlaceCal network diagram

all the events near them in the next month in a radius they specify. We think
this will really help reach the harder-to-reach parts of our population.

Auto-updated widgets for websites

Lots of organisations dont have the time or skills to keep their website
updated. We will create a small pattern library of widgets allowing for the
event data to be embedded in their own website, and help organisations use it.
This will help promote PlaceCal across lots of organisations and be a bit more
user-friendly than the current embedded Google Calendars people tend to
use.

Creation of posters and flyers

Well make it easy to quickly create an event poster or yer or venue listing
from the site. This will help save a lot of document preparation time and
again, promote PlaceCal as well as the individual organisations.

Were also helping that this will help organisations work together. For

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example, if theres four learn to use computers classes in an area, we can
create a combined poster that then all the organisations can use, promoting
everyones events together.

Current situation
Were currently still interviewing initial cohort with our technical audit. If
youre interested in getting involved come get me after the workshop and we
can get you on board.

Were working out the details of the training plan and support. Hopefully if
enough people are interested we can get some dedicated support classes run
in the area by existing Manchester tech organisations. If youd like to help
with this again, get in touch.

Were aiming to launch version 1 of PlaceCal in August or September give us

your email to get a notication when we launch.

Any other ideas or suggestions come talk to us!

Future ideas
Weve got a lot of other ideas behind this wed like to start pursuing. We see
PlaceCal as the rst of many community technology interventions so the
groundwork were doing now will be invaluable going forwards.

API. PlaceCal itself we hope will become a platform in its own right. We are
planning on opening up our API to other applications including Manchester
City Council CityVerve, so everyone can benet from our high quality events
listing, working together to create something better than we could by
ourselves.

Membership. Were trialling a membership system for MAFN we hope to

integrate eventually. Weve got a lot of demographic and survey data about
local residents, and could potentially release anonymised data to event
organisers via a simple app that scans memberships cards. We could also,
with permission, allow event organisers to create instant email lists of people

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coming to their events. Again, the focus here is on enabling organisations to
do what they do but better.

Room booking. Finding free or cheap rooms to use is a big blocker for people
starting community organisations. As we conduct our eldwork were nding
all sorts of underused spaces and rooms. Many university or city council
buildings also have bookable rooms if you know who to talk to. We hope to
make a unied room booking system that allows people to nd good local
options near them to start community groups.

Action Plans. Part of the MAFN eldwork is generating what we call Action
Plans. These are reports of the research weve been doing qualitative and
quantitive data in thematic categories, and what we are going to do to try and
remedy local social problems. Were looking into making an online version of
this too. This would be a high tech interactive tool to both disseminate our
research ndings and help people express feelings and actions for their local
area.

Lifts. A big blocker for many socially isolated people to events is getting lifts
any many of the larger care organisations are quite risk-averse and dont
like doing door-to-door service. Wed like to see if theres a way we can help
integrate a request a lift feature into PlaceCal, maybe working with Ring and
Ride or volunteer drivers.

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