Event function for Diaspora?

I have a customer from Berlin is looking for a solution a bit like meetup.com. If the budget is enough for add to Diaspora a event feature and we can use Diaspora code as base for our project - maybe that’s a win-win situation.


Users of diaspora as a political project should desire for a event function - right ? I guess I am not the first how is thinking about it. Some functions can be can be taken as useful from facebook. more close to the Diaspora styl is meetup.com.
I would like to get in contact to discuss the issue with people. I am from Germany we have developers in Kathmandu Nepal and Kolkata India.

joe schraube
postbox [at) fair-web-design.com


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Diaspora is not a business, It’s a software minding for social benefit, not for profit. If you want to use or modify the code, you can, but mantaining the licence as is. When a function is added, is for a social need and is discussed by all, is not for a personal convenience.

I think such a function would be nice and I imagine it would work much like the poll or location-feature. You can add a time and location of the event and people can state that they are “coming” or “not sure”.

This would be of not much use (other than having nice UI) unless you, as a user, can get a private ical-feed for your profile where all events you said YES and MAYBE are included with the info from the post.

Without that functionality you could just write markdown and let people accept the event in the comments. :wink:

Another important thing: If you build this feature it’s important that you take responsibility for the feature and maintain it / fix bugs and stuff in the future. Nobody likes one-shot-code. :slight_smile:

We did a test run this morning federating redmatrix events to Diaspora. Don’t know if everybody can see this, but here:

https://joindiaspora.com/posts/5038574

We’re basically doing hcal over ActivityStreams. When sending these events to Diaspora we render them in markdown which loses all the semantic hcal information, and we can’t do anything about the observer’s timezone since this is completely undefined; so unfortunately on the Diaspora side all events are stuck in the Zulu timezone and the critical details can’t easily be extracted (such as to add to a calendar) because the micro-formatting is lost.

I won’t try and influence what direction you take, only recommend that you keep redmatrix developers in the loop so we can maintain compatibility or at least translate between the two platforms with minimal information loss.

I think an event function would be great, it would give D* some of the appeal of meetup.com. I’d also love to see “groups”.

I have a customer from Berlin is looking for a solution a bit like meetup.com. If the budget is enough for add to Diaspora a event feature and we can use Diaspora code as base for our project - maybe that’s a win-win situation.

Sounds win-win to me! It would be awesome if the feature was made in a way that it could be ported to upstream core too. If not by your team then with some other volunteers.

Pity as a project we don’t have a budget, so we can’t help except in the normal ways project devs help anyone - eg giving support on #diaspora-dev mostly :slight_smile: But if you start the work, make sure to shout out on diaspora with the #diaspora tag, maybe you can get someone interested to help you!

Hadn’t someone mentioned using CalDAV somewhere else? Would this be relevant or useful?

CalDAV is used to read and write of events. We would only need reading of events (because events are created using posts with event-characteristic), so ical is the weapon of choice. It’s a wide spread format and can be used like an rss-feed, but for events.

@ Jason Robinson :
to be honest I’m just trying to understand how Diaspora works as an organization. How are decisions made and how can I find people who would welcome a such a development of a event feature.
how I can prevent double work.
how can I find people the say : I like the Idea but no time,
how can I find people the say I like the idea but only time to give from tome to time some comments.
how can I find people the say I like the idea and if you have a budget let me know …
I get no contact informations here at lommeo , a skype with some of you would be nice Im at Germay - Berlin time.

@ Mike Macgirvin : redmatrix is new for me - i check it out !

When sending these events to Diaspora we render them in markdown which loses all the semantic hcal information, and we can’t do anything about the observer’s timezone since this is completely undefined

It sounds like the first step here would be to have a time-zone field for users added to D* and we should let the user choose their time-zone when they create the account, and in their settings page. So we need to add a field to the DB, and alter some view pages, as I understand it.

how can I find people the say : I like the Idea but no time,
how can I find people the say I like the idea but only time to give from tome to time some comments.
how can I find people the say I like the idea and if you have a budget let me know …

diaspora* is entierly developped by benevolent on free time and without any contract. Decision are made just right here by vote from those who signed up. So, if you want to find someone to develop this feature, you cannot just sign a contract with the foundation to develop it.

As diaspora* is open-source, you just need to find a good developer. If this work benefits to the network itself and respects the license, I think core-devs will be happy to help him.

As diaspora* is open-source, you just need to find a good developer.

(from the original proposal):

I am from Germany we have developers in Kathmandu Nepal and Kolkata India.

Sounds as though he already has developers, so just needs to go ahead, fork the project and create the feature for his client. Whether he then wants to offer it back upstream to the main code-base is of course up to him. If he chooses to do that, it would of course be great to have discussion prior to its creation about what would be best for D*'s network and its users.

Existing discussion re events feature: https://www.loomio.org/d/Fzc6uy7X/add-support-for-events-in-diaspora

@goob : Ah, ok. I thought he just wanted the foundation to develop the feature in exchange of money, with contract.

In any way, I’d really like to see this feature come ! :smiley:

I’m all for having an Events feature for Diaspora; it would be really nice if it were made to be compatible with RedMatrix’s Events feature. That way, people on both platforms could make use of it.

if it were made to be compatible with RedMatrix’s Events feature. That way, people on both platforms could make use of it.

If algorithm is created, would it be difficult or long to implement it ?

ok fine I get a first picture and get some contacts … thx for the comments so far. I will post updates if there are any.
you can contact me if you like at : https://pod.geraspora.de/u/webmystiker

The technical details of the project is being discussed at https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/1359

@praveenarimbrathod since this is a big feature guys please make sure to discuss the implementation before working too much code out - it would be a shame if something was done under a huge effort and then for some reason the code cannot be landed in the core.

A good initial design and then you can be sure the code will be accepted! :slight_smile: