Unconference: Making event listing easier to find online
We discussed how we could make the discovery of community repair events easier for the public (focusing specifically on online searching, but posters etc in local community is equally important).
how do we currently do it?
We started by asking, how do groups currently list events?
It could be via
- meetup
- groups’ own websites
- a repair platform such as used by Reparatur Initiativen (https://github.com/anstiftung/mapped-repair-events) or Restarters.net (https://github.com/TheRestartProject/restarters.net)
- some combination of all of the above (some hosts find the time for this, others not)
Events on Facebook are only accessible within Facebook’s platform. Events on Meetup are displayed in Google. Events on repair platforms and group websites will be picked up by search engines, but depends on level of SEO as to where they appear. Some positives of Facebook and Meetup, for a host, is that you might get an idea of how many people are coming in advance (although it isn’t necessarily accurate).
Why work on a common way of listing?
- to make it easy for someone to find the nearest community repair event near them, without needing to know which repair network its part of, and where to go to find the listings
The fragmentation across different platforms (and different repair networks) might be making it difficult for the public to discover an event near them. If we could find and agree on a common way of listing events online, we could make it easier for people to discover events near them, and increase the number of participants in community repair.
Two approaches to doing this:
- work together to agree on a format that we all list repair events in, and aggregate them together ourselves
- use an existing event markup format that already works with search engines
Making and aggregating our own format
We could determine our own standard for repair event listings. We could then aggregate that open data together ourselves, and provide a central place to search them. Essentially open data on repair events, with a registry of sites that are listing in this format, and a custom built search to search through them.
pros
- we control the format, the display, and means of searching
- we know where all the listings are coming from
cons
- we have to do all the work of ‘crawling’ or maintaining a registry, and aggregation, ourselves
Existing formats
Google has recently started supporting explicit markup of events, and will display results more prominently. Google use schema.org Events for this. Usual SEO approaches are still needed, this is just a complement to them.
We’ve been experimenting with this at Restart by adding the relevant JSON-LD in to listings. It doesn’t require any extra work from hosts - just a small extra piece of code in our platform.
schema.org is supported by other search engines, though we’ve not yet looked in to whether they do pull out event data.
pros
- easy to add to existing tools
- can add it in to own group’s website if preferred
- crawling and aggregation across various sites/platforms comes for free
cons
- loses some of the specifics of repair events
- but perhaps could be explored by using custom fields
- links through to full information on original sites, anyway
- feeding the Google machine - don’t want Google to become the arbiter of everything
We’ve started testing this approach on Restarters.net, with promising results so far:
events in search results:
more information about the event when clicked:
Neither approaches make events more prominent in Facebook, which is a big way that people find events at present.
To add notes, click on the ‘Edit’ button, bottom right
