Progressive activism aggregator/calendar
June 14, 2017 12:20 PM Subscribe
Attention data scientists and others: I've been looking for--and failing to find--a progressive political activism events/actions aggregator. Something like travel aggregator Kayak only for progressive political action (covering orgs such as Swing Left, MoveOn, Indivisible). Failing that, a glorified calendar.
I was able to find a political blog hub but that's not what I'm interested in. So my question is two-fold:
1. How would someone go about building such a thing (ideally searchable by date and location), if that is even possible and
2. What might such a thing be called?
I was able to find a political blog hub but that's not what I'm interested in. So my question is two-fold:
1. How would someone go about building such a thing (ideally searchable by date and location), if that is even possible and
2. What might such a thing be called?
> 1. How would someone go about building such a thing (ideally searchable by date and location), if that is even possible
One of the first things you'd want to do is talk to the people that run these orgs' own websites to see if they can offer some sort of data sharing arrangement -- some sort of API-based access to the data so you don't have to scrape it. You might have to come to those groups with an alpha-quality demo of the site to show that it's worth their while to share data with you.
If you don't get anywhere with that, or if they don't have any sort of back-end APIs, you'd just have to scrape their webpages, as long as their site's terms of service allow for that. (I'm guessing there would be some that don't.) You'd also have to plug in to Facebook, as I understand a lot of the planning for some of the smaller groups occurs only inside that walled garden.
Once you are sure you'll have data in some format that can be loaded into your system, you need somewhere to put the data. If I were doing it just to get something running quickly, I'd start with a web content management system. The one I'm most familiar with is Drupal, and as long as it hasn't changed significantly since I last used it ~5 years ago, I feel like it'd be a good base platform to build a site like this.
If this were a more significant effort to build something from the ground up, you get into data model design, client-side web programming, etc. and it becomes a much bigger deal that probably involves a team of people. But I feel like one or two determined people could get something running that imports things from upstream sources and provides some basic UI for managing events, actions, issue-oriented campaigns, etc.
> 2. What might such a thing be called?
Other than "a really awesome idea", it sounds like an "activism portal" or a "political action platform".
posted by tonycpsu at 1:40 PM on June 14, 2017
One of the first things you'd want to do is talk to the people that run these orgs' own websites to see if they can offer some sort of data sharing arrangement -- some sort of API-based access to the data so you don't have to scrape it. You might have to come to those groups with an alpha-quality demo of the site to show that it's worth their while to share data with you.
If you don't get anywhere with that, or if they don't have any sort of back-end APIs, you'd just have to scrape their webpages, as long as their site's terms of service allow for that. (I'm guessing there would be some that don't.) You'd also have to plug in to Facebook, as I understand a lot of the planning for some of the smaller groups occurs only inside that walled garden.
Once you are sure you'll have data in some format that can be loaded into your system, you need somewhere to put the data. If I were doing it just to get something running quickly, I'd start with a web content management system. The one I'm most familiar with is Drupal, and as long as it hasn't changed significantly since I last used it ~5 years ago, I feel like it'd be a good base platform to build a site like this.
If this were a more significant effort to build something from the ground up, you get into data model design, client-side web programming, etc. and it becomes a much bigger deal that probably involves a team of people. But I feel like one or two determined people could get something running that imports things from upstream sources and provides some basic UI for managing events, actions, issue-oriented campaigns, etc.
> 2. What might such a thing be called?
Other than "a really awesome idea", it sounds like an "activism portal" or a "political action platform".
posted by tonycpsu at 1:40 PM on June 14, 2017
Best answer: This is a really active space, which is both a blessing and a curse. There are a lot of tools, groups, etc springing up. I've got a spreadsheet of well over a hundred of them.
Here are some possibilities to check out, from my list:
posted by galaxy rise at 2:28 PM on June 14, 2017 [3 favorites]
Here are some possibilities to check out, from my list:
- RiseStronger/People's Calendar (mentioned above)
- Resistance Calendar
- Acts of Conscience
- What Do I Do About Trump's ActionHub
posted by galaxy rise at 2:28 PM on June 14, 2017 [3 favorites]
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Your idea of programmatically aggregating events from different calendars is interesting. I haven't seen anything like that. But at least aggregating events from several different progressive websites or whatever should be pretty achievable.
The challenge to making something reasonably complete would be that tons of different groups organize actions of various kinds, and most of them target their outreach locally in no standard way across various channels. So the data you are trying to aggregate is scattered and untracked, frequently appears as unstructured text, etc.
posted by grobstein at 1:21 PM on June 14, 2017