#introduction
Hi, I am the main developer of gancio, a shared agenda of events that supports AP.
TLDR;
All of you know that “supports AP” means everything and nothing, so I’ll try to explain what it supports and why.
Gancio was born in Italy from political hacking movements, in particular from the hacklab underscore, a place that crosses the social movements and squats here in Turin (north-west italy).
We have set up a “radical local server” cisti dot org that hosts services explicitly designed and reasoned for people / movements / groups / collectives to whom we feel similar here in the vicinity, so it is NOT our intention to grow and indeed, we believe that one of the main issues of technology is the scale and disconnection from reality and territory.
Since we liked the idea of the federation very much and there is a discussion about the social networks in Italy rather strong within the movements, shaken by the experience of indymedia (for example, in the last month FB italy has closed many accounts of groups that dealt with rojava and Syria) we have set up a local instance of mastodon, following the example of brothers / sisters hackers of bologna collective bida.im.
The next step, was to think of a shared calendar so last year we looked for solutions but none liked us and so we decided to write it ourselves and gancio was born.
It now has about a year of life, two instances (one in Turin and one in Florence), about 600 published events, some new instances coming and much positive feedback from the communities.
Our background is therefore that of hackmeeting (a three days national hosted annually in a different place, often a squat, which brings together all groups that do hacking / hacktivism in Italy for over 20 years) and that of projects such as autistici.org
Some relevant and particular features inside gancio:
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focus on content not on people:
nowhere on gancio appears the identity of who published the event, not even under a nickname, not even to administrators (except in the db). this is not an ego friendly platform. -
visitors first! we do not want logged user to get more features than random visitors. we do not want users to register, except to publish events and even in this case …
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anon events: optionally a visitor can create events without being registered (an admin has to confirm them)
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We are not interested in making hits so we export events in many ways, via RSS feeds, via global or individual ics, incorporating lists of events or single events via iframe on other websites. Notification via mail is coming.
AP support, what’s up to now
Each instance has only one “Actor” that publishes each event when it is published.
We are considering the introduction of other “Actor” but they will not be linked to users, rather to places or tags/categories.
There are no personal homes with a timeline of people I follow, everyone has a sort of local timeline of the instance, it’s an anti filter-bubble feature.
Events are not published with the type Event but with type Note because we wanted to add the possibility to interact with events from our mastodon instance (boost / bookmark and “comments” that we call resources because we don’t want it to become a place of debate, but more a place where to keep a historical memory of events, e.g. an audio recording of a talk).
When mastodon will support Event object type we will change for sure.
We are also currently testing instances and users’s moderation.
AP support, what’s boiling in the pot
As some more instances are coming, the ideas we are thinking about was the possibility to share events with these instances. The main idea was that the administrators would follow their respective instances that trusts and that in the publication of the events there would be the possibility to specify the geographical relevance and the importance of an event (I had imagined 4 levels, regional, national, international and global) and that the other instances would publish the events coming from trusted instances for the events of geo-competence.
money money
Who’s paying you? You know well that to develop software today is one of the most privileged job that exists, so we decided to use this privilege to devote time and space to projects explicitly outside and against the logic of profit. We steal time from capital, we work for money as little as possible because we can afford it.
We do not want to make gancio our job because it is not. So no, no sponsors, advertising, donations.
It would not change the time to devote or the quality of the software, for us.
Of course any help or feedback, is appreciated.
Sorry for the length but I think context matters