reply | Chris Aldrich

Replied to Ditching Event Platforms for the IndieWeb by

Recently there's been a big shift to move away from Meetup.com as a platform.

Something that may come as a shock to most attendees of events is that organisers have to pay for each of you to be part of the Meetup group, even if you are just there to keep up to date on events, but don't attend anything.

Some organisers just don't fancy spending the money on it, and some are outraged by the news about new monetisation strategies that Meetup may be looking at moving to.

These issues have led many groups to investigate the alternatives that we can pursue, but unfortunately many have decided to build their own instead of pooling resources with the existing Free or Open Source platforms, of which there are many.

Jamie, your post reminds me about upcoming.org which was a social site that got bought and sold several times becoming a corporate controlled silo, but was relatively recently bought back by the founder and relaunched with some of the old and missing data. (It has been open sourced on GitHub by the way.) They’ve been slowly been iterating on it to add additional functionality and have considered being IndieWeb friendly.

One of the pieces that makes MeetUp.com so valuable is its centralized nature as a one-stop-shop for every locale. To better disrupt the space and still provide that value, perhaps an open source version that could be very IndieWeb friendly might attempt to act as an aggregation hub and provide some of the services while still allowing people to post their events and RSVPs to their own sites, but still provide the clearing house to bigger communities. This could be a service like meetup.com or upcoming.org but it would work more like IndieWeb News or Kicks Condor’s IndieWeb.xyz.

The resulting workflow would look like roughly like this:

An organizer posts an event with details to their website and then uses webmention to syndicate a copy to the hub event site. The hub then parses the basic data and allows it to be displayed on pages that were sortable by date and city (at a minimum). People could then have their one-stop centralized location for events, but then RSVP directly to the original on their own sites as you indicated.

To take things further, additional useful services could be added by the hub in the form of a micropub client that organizers could use to input all their event data and then publish it to their micropub capable website. (Quill already has the ability to post events like this as an example in the wild.) Similarly, for individual attendees, the hub could have a micropub client to do RSVPs to both the attendees’ websites (and/or the events’ site) as well.

Naturally this presupposes that a benevolent actor(s) could serve as the hub and handle the maintenance and overhead of that piece.

Replied to a tweet by

Tom Woodward (Twitter)

This social media data translator opens up a world of nice possibilities. github.com/snarfed/granary //cc @cogdog @J_Everhart383 @heyohbunkbunk
— Tom Woodward (@twoodwar) November 8, 2019

h/t @ChrisAldrich in the @wpcampusorg slack
— Tom Woodward (@twoodwar) November 8, 2019

All the credit really goes to Ryan Barrett and the huge open source crowd in the #IndieWeb who provide a truly magic tech layer for adding onto the #DoOO and #EdTech space. If you haven’t tried it, step on in and say hello! 👋

Replied to Constantly building new memory palaces is annoying by

Ywan Müller (Art of Memory Forum)

Hello, I have a problem and I hope, you can help me. Is there a way to just memorize information with mnemotechniques without doing much work beforhand? My problem is, that I am tired of having to constantely building new memory palaces before I can memorize something. (Reusing memory palaces does not work for me, unfortunately.) Is there a technique where I don`t have to constantely memorize new loci, a technique where I can just put the infos somewhere and review them later? And if so, how does this technique work and is it efficient (a good way to memorize things)? Thanks.

In many modern descriptions of the method of loci, they’re often (unfortunately) described as places that are frequently reused as they would be for memory competitions. This makes them much tougher to use for remembering more useful things in longer term memory. As a result I use a small handful of very specifically selected places for these sorts of short term memory-based journeys. When I’m done with the specific task at hand, I mentally travel back through the journey and wash out all of those short term memories so that I can come back to them in rotation and they’re fresh and clean with many of the memories having faded out with the advance of time. Alternately peg-systems or linked story-systems can be used depending on the items being memorized.

For longer term memory, I prefer to use more everyday locations such as my home (or previous residences, schools, college, etc.) or walks around my neighborhood. This way, as I’m moving about my house, neighborhood, or other frequently visited quotidian places, I’m seeing the accumulated images and regularly re-firming them in my memory. This regular revisiting of them makes them stick in my long term memory much better. For things you want to keep for longer term, revisiting them at an hour, a day, a week, a month, and then three months with occasional annual revisits helps to keep them stored permanently in your long term memory. This method also allows you to add additional information via images over time so that when you’ve read that biography of Abraham Lincoln, for example, you can add any additional information to the loci where you stored him when you may have memorized all of the U.S. presidents in order. Lynne Kelly has a reasonably good description of this in her book The Memory Code where she discusses the timeline of history she’s created in a journey around her neighborhood.

In short, one should carefully consider the type of information one is trying to memorize, the length of time one wants to remember it, and then choose from one of the many methods for remembering it. Experience in doing this takes some time and advanced thought, but in the end will give better results.

Replied to #oext372 #oextend What is inside your open education fortune cookie? | The Daily Extend (extend-daily.ecampusontario.ca)

What will be your future in open education? It will likely not be written inside a fortune cookie, but you can make sure you get the fortune you want.

Use the PhotoFunia Fortune Cookie Generator to produce the one you would like to see happen for yourself.

Borrowed from the Mural UDG Daily Opener 17

Here’s what I found in my fortune cookie:

Photo made using PhotoFunia