Our New Movement Calendar Updates Itself!
Ever since we launched the Movement Infrastructure Project, one of the most popular resources in our library has been our Movement Calendar. Our Movement Calendar hosts actions and events relevant to social movement organizers and activists around DC as well as layers with key dates for planning ahead like the Congressional Schedule, holidays, elections and the Supreme Court’s schedule.
Each week hundreds of organizers visit the calendar to see what’s going on and find out how to get involved in the movement. And dozens of organizations regularly post to the calendar to spread the word about their events.
But the biggest challenge with operating a live calendar has always been keeping the information up to date.
Volunteers with the MIP team have spent hours reminding partners to post their events to the calendar and manually posting events that people have shared with us. When we have the capacity to keep it going the calendar is full and useful, when we’re busy with other work (often the times when a resource like a calendar would be most useful!) the calendar gets stale.
Because a movement calendar is only useful if it’s up-to-date, we’ve been hard at work developing a new platform that automatically pulls events from public feeds, partner websites and distro-lists and queues them up to get posted to the calendar with just one click. The result is a much more robust calendar that is reliably up-to-date!
Right now the calendar lists 162 movement events including 29 events in the next week alone!
This system is a big improvement but we still miss events so if you know of an event that should be included, please submit it to the calendar and we’ll get it added ASAP. And if your organization regularly posts events on your website and want us to try to add them to our pipeline to get automatically ingested into the Movement Calendar please shoot us an email at info@movementinfrastructureproject.org and we’ll try to get it linked in!
This calendar is a resource for the movement so feel free to steal the content! You can subscribe to the calendar feed here, or shoot us a message if you want an iframe to embed on your website!
We’ve been hard at work this summer so stay tuned for future updates on new tools and resources for our movements!
Help keep the Movement Infrastructure Project strong!
The Movement Infrastructure Project is an all volunteer project that’s supported by donations from supporters like YOU! If you think shared infrastructure like our calendar, action planning map, daybook and gear library are important consider donating to keep this project strong!
