Hi, I'm Glenn. I'm going to talk to you about Oak Log, which is a cooperative experiment that we've started in the Oakland Bay Area to build a community calendar, so a kind of commons for event data. And for a little context for approach, I have some scar tissue from crypto. And so one of the things that I really like this term sewer socialism, and I think Zorron in New York is one of the folks that exemplifies this, which is you win someone's trust over through an outcome rather than ideology. So I think as we've gone through this project, even though I think about it as like digital public media infrastructure, I try to really ground it in we are helping Oaklanders and other barrier folk find and go to local events, and we happen to be using at Barco.
This all starts with the Oakland Review of Books, which is a new alt-weekly that uh helps start last year. Um as part of the Oakland Review of Books, we started to publish a community calendar of literary events, of cultural events, of protests, uh, and it got some real great pickup. Um and so one of the things I saw, this is Martina who does a lot of this work for us, uh, and it was a huge pain for her to do this work. She like all of these events are fragmented all over the place. So getting all that data in one place was a real pain.
And then the part that she actually really liked to do that was also really valuable for our our audience, which is that curation, the taste, the telling people why that this might be an interesting thing to go to. Um, that was a tiny portion of the work that she actually got to do. So we built some tools, uh Discord bot and some other um uh CMS tools just to help us manage this. Um we started realizing as we talked to lots of other people around the bay is that there's there's tons, there's dozens of folks that are doing this same thing, the same uh putting together these kind of curated calendars.
Um so what we decided to do is just get them all in one room. Uh so we invited all of the folks, the public media station, the uh their neighborhood calendar makers, there's you know lots of folks, altweeklies, newsrooms, all that are doing the same thing of of managing calendars and helping people find events. Um so we got everybody together and we talked about how might we share practices, share tools, share data, what would that look like? And one thing that came out of that is everyone had the same sense of how do we do this thing together?
We need a mega calendar, but but not dystopia. Um so uh we can just do things. Um so we started to talk about what it might look like to do this together on an open protocol. Uh so we kind of walked through, and I think this are some of the lessons of how we've we've talked about this is so you know, starting with something like on Instagram Reels where you have a venue publishing their data in this form, we've moved that out now into a database that each of our individual organizations are using, whether it's Grist or Airtable or Excel, what have you.
And uh the next step is can we do this in a shared database? Uh then you know, here's the atproto record of a calendar event. Um so you know, one of the helpful points here is you know, can you start wherever you get your events, much like wherever you get to your podcasts and actually have that event data that venues want out there anyways actually be available, and then there's a lot more we can start doing with it. Um the advantages that that were really attractive to the publishers is one is how do we start sharing these workflow tools.
So we have our our Discord bot. There are others who have been building tools that are scraping venue sites or big event sites, uh, and tons of folks where it's just how does the venue actually create their own event or submit it to publishers, all going into the same lexicon, the same uh data that we can then use. Um and on the other end, we start being able to do a lot more with that data now that we've all collaborated on that, that shared uh element. So one is we can still maintain editorial control. We can still curate what is showing up in our individual um uh publications and the commentary that we put around it, but we can also collaborate.
So if we add an event, then you know, if orb adds something, then Coyote or same page SF can use that same uh that same data. Um we can play with whatever format we like, whether it's in a post or in a calendar, um, and really excited to start exploring more of the social functionality of can we can we see what folks in your social network are uh interested in attending or going and not have it be specific to Luma or Eventbridge or others. I think it starts getting much more attractive from the user perspective. Um so focusing a little bit more on the the publisher control piece, um, so we can still publish as we do in a newsletter, um, but I think that there's some other interesting examples here.
This this middle one is uh from roundabout at New Public, and one of the things that they're really focused on is how do you moderate uh you know, have a local neighborhood steward actually be able to moderate what goes on there. I think they're using the same same schema that we are. I think there's going to be some really interesting ways to interoperate there. Another really interesting example, this is a group down in the Bay called the Relational Tech Project. And what they're doing is enabling neighborhood stewards to use AI tools to build their own applications, including things like calendar apps and so and allow that to be much more situated and kind of fit for what that community needs.
So the community of the outer sunset, for instance, in San Francisco also wants to see how the waves are, for instance, and incorporate things that make sense for that community. So what's next from here is after our community calendar conference, we had not only a bunch of these media organizations, etc. We have a bunch of people who really want to collaborate on the tech side. And one in particular that's really interesting is KQED, which is our big uh local NPR station that is really interested in anchoring and supporting this. And so we're we're starting to go down the path of what might it look like to create a community PDS for the Oakland Bay Area, and specifically starting with uh with events.
Um we're also starting to explore new local applications that actually take advantage of this collaboration. So uh one organization is thinking about doing a pop-up calendar that's kind of poorly suited for existing things like Yelp and others, so that's one thing we're looking into. Others are things more like a TV guide ish like what's happening right now in Oakland and the Bay Area. So I think there's gonna be a lot of things that we can start building on top of this. We're starting with the media curators that are already trusted, that already have audience that already have attention, but from there we're really excited to expand that participation and get more venues involved and ultimately more residents.
Um then we're also looking at beyond uh what this group can do together just on events, but thinking more generally about what does a local community API look like? What is all the public data that we could could share? I think there's lots of other use cases of things like buy nothing groups or lending libraries or you know, lots of things that exist on kind of the margins of existing social platforms that if we had more of a public spectrum for the open social web, we can see really different applications develop. Um, much like in the US, the kind of content you see on PBS or NPR is quite a bit different than the way you see commercially.
Um then ideally this all feeds into hey, if this works in Oakland and the Bay Area and works for this NPR station or this altweekly, um, how do we create this playbook that allows other uh geographies to do similar things of building for themselves? Yeah, so that that's where it's it's all kind of emergent. Um but I think what I what I really love about it is that it feels like a great demonstration of what I I think is the promise of these applications on App Protocol, which is really by collaborating across organization, can we actually build something that has a better experience for the users where you don't need to know anything about how this is built other than everybody has collaborated to make it better, and that's what you see, and so uh we can just do things together is the uh the point.
So