The Future of Calendaring

Introduction

Advancing calendaring technologies would benefit and convenience individuals and strengthen communities, directly, and would facilitate civic engagement and strengthen democracy, indirectly.

What if individuals could open their calendaring and scheduling applications to easily browse and discover future events?

What if individuals could open their calendaring and scheduling applications to easily browse and discover documents, minutes, pictures, and videos from past events using the same calendar-based user experiences?

What if individuals could automatically receive notifications when upcoming events of interest to them were modified, e.g., cancelled or rescheduled, and when past events of interest to them were modified, e.g., added to with documents, minutes, pictures, or videos?

Centralized and Decentralized Calendaring

To advance calendaring technologies, it appears that there are two options: centralized and decentralized architectures.

Centralized calendaring would involve people going to one or a few websites, e.g., www.yourcity.gov, to browse past and upcoming events via web-based calendar widgets. One or a few people in “calendar management” roles might receive emails from event organizers around town and then add received events to their communities’ calendars.

Similarly, one or a few services could make use of mailing lists to email their subscribers with .ics attachments, per the iCalendar format. There is also CalDAV to consider, a standard for people to access and manage calendaring data and to schedule meetings with people on the same or other remote servers. This standard allows multiple people in different locations to share, search, and synchronize their calendaring data.

Decentralized calendaring would utilize ActivityPub or derived technologies. Instead of every event provider or organizer having to coordinate with one or a few calendar managers, event organizers would simply publish their events and any updates to these themselves, e.g., events occurring at community centers, council meetings, libraries, nightclubs, parks, places of worship, restaurants, schools, social clubs, theatres, townhalls, or other venues.

See Also

On February 10, there was a meeting about Event Federation and the “Calendiverse”:

Conclusion

I would like to express support for the ongoing “Calendiverse” discussions and activities. I am eager to brainstorm and to discuss technology ideas to advance decentralized calendaring with you. Thank you.

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@AdamSobieski will you be at the 2025 offdem ? We can continue work on this project there … https://event-federation.eu/2024/02/10/fediversity-at-o₄ffdem/

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@becha1 , thank you. I’m in the United States and, so, if it is possible to attend OFFDEM 2025 virtually, February 1, and/or to watch any video recordings from the events, I would be interested.

Presently, I’m exploring a few websites and taking a closer look at software solutions like Mobilizon and Gancio and learning more about bridging content-management systems like WordPress and Drupal to federated calendaring systems.

I’m also thinking about P2P filesharing, file systems (e.g. IPFS), and related technologies for providing distributed and redundant storage, search, and other service backplanes for decentralized calendaring systems. That is, distributed P2P systems could support decentralized systems.

Towards Distributed Automated Content Moderation

With respect to distributed and decentralized calendaring systems, as considered, communities’ events would be added and updated infrequently compared to the items on more general-purpose P2P systems. So, computation required to perform any automated content moderation on newly arriving and modified community events could be conceivably allocated.

One approach to distributed automated content moderation is to algorithmically select nodes from a P2P network to process and scan newly arriving or modified events. These algorithmically selected nodes would, along with content creators, digitally sign events if they were neither spam nor other forms of malicious content.

That is, artificial-intelligence software agents capable of performing automated content moderation could participate in multi-party digital signing of newly arriving and modified events. These secondary signatures would indicate that the content was analyzed, e.g., scanned, using a specified version of a software component and a specified version of a set of data or rules.

Cryptographic hashes of newly arriving or modified events, including timestamps, could be used to route content to (sequences of) nodes for automated content moderation. These algorithmic routing algorithms would select one or more nodes, each selected node having a fallback node sequence.

After processing a certain number of items during a certain amount of time, nodes could respond with something like HTTP 429, which would signal to other nodes that routing algorithms should iterate to those next nodes in a sequence.

In these ways, events could be digitally signed by both their creators and one or more algorithmically-selected software agents residing on nodes having unique identifiers or addresses proximate to cryptographic hashes of the content.

See Also

Sokoto, Saidu, Leonhard Balduf, Dennis Trautwein, Yiluo Wei, Gareth Tyson, Ignacio Castro, Onur Ascigil et al. “Guardians of the Galaxy: Content Moderation in the InterPlanetary File System.” In 33rd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 24), pp. 1507-1524. 2024.

Vashishth, Shikhar, Yash Sinha, and K. Hari Babu. “Addressing Challenges in Browser Based P2P Content Sharing Framework using WebRTC.” In 2016 IEEE 30th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA) , pp. 850-857. IEEE, 2016.

Hi @AdamSobieski, that’s a fantastic overview, thanks so much for sharing it here. I’ve also been doing some thinking about decentralised calendaring, but more from the PoV of how to use existing tools like Mobilizon and Gancio. I’m keen to get a testing group together, and do some tire-kicking starting in April, after my outdoor events work finished for the summer.

very exciting topic. and one that i would also like to tackle with https://rdf-pub.org. Unfortunately, I don’t have the resources to deal with it at the moment. I would first like to implement a few basic things like following and ReplyTo. but theoretically I could already process events now. I might have another look at @andre 's FEP in the next few days. @andre do you have a test event to hand?
best regards

Can we introduce a tag like calendiverse ? That makes it maybe easier to follow the messages.