• create a topic or subject, as a starting point
• link a topic to place-date-time to make it an event
• others fill in details, or comment, or correct any aspect
• they register to go and you have a self-organizing crowd

Create any activity and it becomes a new stream; the community promotes it. Some of us attend events; some organize events: together we make it better in the city.

How to

Publish an event. At least propose a topic. Comment on bugs and development issues to help prioritize. Discuss methods here.

Problem to solve

Many activities are calendar conflicts. Information comes to you at haphazard times and from various sources. Do you undo an RSVP right away, or leave it till the last minute, or till never?

Together we can build / wikify an attention platform, to post a topic / event, let anyone correct details, and turn it into a newsletter item. Then, anyone can send news to friends / followers, and confident that it’s been community-verified.

As an attendee we want to honour our RSVP’s. When we are event organizers we want valid data, to know those who RSVP’d are indeed arriving and staying for the event. When we are a sponsor we want valid data too.

The co-opetition

We can rally groups of organizers-admins-curators. E.g. here are independently curated calendars (Spring 2016)

1. Montreal NewTech & Startup Events calendar curated by Ilias Benjelloun
2. Your Meetups, see Export to… link on the right sidebar
3. Search the local Eventbrite events, as you register to these, they show up automatically in your Google Calendar for example
4. Your own upcoming Facebook events feed, you can right-click Upcoming Events link, see lower-right sidebar, and add your calendar by URL into Google Calendar
5. MTLData Calendar duplicates a lot of technical meetups posted by other groups
6. UPGlobal’s (this is the Startup Weekend crowd) Montreal Startup Digest calendar - you need to register to receive the weekly newsletter
7. Montreal in Technology calendar
8. Add your own favorite events lists here
9. Any of these sources might propagate errors instead of propagating the right (newly changed) copy of your event

Summary

If you have all these calendars feeding your personal .ics calendar, great! If you read them all - comparing and contrasting - and if you’re happy doing that work, then you don’t need this BetterMtl project. But, if you find it to be a mess, then contribute to this project.

To contribute big-time

Fork, modify, send us pull-requests. Or, star ★ bettermtl.github.io repo. Show you care - about the success of this project. It motivates us. Thank you because we appreciate your vote of confidence!

This platform is free of legal constraint, and you may modify it because it’s open source software.