Hello! I recently did an intro in Introductions and wanted to highlight our biggest project. I’ll cut and paste a bit of our pitch we’ve been sending around here:
PlaceCal is our international award-winning software and community development approach that lets you curate a list of groups and events for any combination of place and interest.
Other people are using it to make listings of age friendly groups in Hulme & Moss Side in Manchester, parent and child groups in Torbay, transgender groups in London, and climate and migrant justice groups in the North East (I would link them directly but forum rules restrict me to 2 links per post?)
Some of the things people have told us they want to use it to list are: listing home education networks, a health and wellbeing directory or asset map, cycling groups, independent music venues, reading clubs, gardening groups, and protest and abolition initiatives.
Some of the benefits of making a centralised community calendar and group listing are:
- Reducing social isolation and loneliness, increasing community cohesion, and improving health outcomes
- Assisting with local strategies like community wealth building, asset-based community development, doughnut economics, and transition towns
- Creating the conditions and networks we need to resist the current “polycrisis” by building a culture of mutual aid and resistance as government, charity and NHS support erodes
- Fulfilling statutory obligations to create asset maps or community directories for institutions, community forums, social care providers, etc.
We know there’s loads of things out there like this — and that none of them are working very well for the people on the ground actually doing the work. People don’t want to go and sign up for one more service, or list their thing on one more website. We agree, and have designed our approach accordingly.
PlaceCal has been developed alongside an engaged community development approach that works by training up existing community organisers (like yourself!) to first go and support all the groups in your partnership to list their events using software they already have, such as Google Calendar, Outlook 365, Eventbrite, and SquareSpace (there’s a full list of supported sources in the PlaceCal documentation). PlaceCal then automatically aggregates this information, requiring almost no effort once set up. This takes all the pressure off the groups to get it set up, but then lets them take it over once it’s running.
Even better, once groups are in the system, they can be added to multiple partnership sites. This way, we are creating a digital commons owned by our dedicated nonprofit, building something like “Wikipedia for community events”, that can be sustained past the end of any one project or volunteers’ input.
Rest of the info from this post is here: Want to use PlaceCal in your community? | Geeks for Social Change
We did a training session for this in July - I wish I had known about this forum then! We are struggling for resources to run this again but wanted to see here if there’s any interest in it from the co-tech community?
