How to cocreate a community calendar with older people in your neighbourhood using PlaceCal

Dr Kim Foale

Workshop Coordinators & Speakers

Dr Kim Foale (they/them) is an activist, developer and researcher based in Manchester, UK. They’ve spent the last 15+ years working with a wide range of grassroots campaigns, small charities, social enterprises and activist groups with a focus on queer and trans liberation, anarchist and trans feminism, and antiracism. Through this combination of skills and lived experience, they've developed a multi-methods approach to systemic change through software development, community activism, and participatory research.

Prof Stefan White

Speaker

Prof Stefan White (he/him) is a Professor of Architecture at Manchester School of Architecture. He is a registered architect with 25 years’ experience specialising in environmental and social sustainability. Stefan has previously been Head of School at MSA and managed a £12m+ budget with over 100 staff. Stefan is a Manchester Metropolitan University Chancellor's Fellow (sponsored by Lord Mandelson) contributing to Metropolis, MMU’s urban think-tank. He is a special advisor to the Greater Manchester Combined Authority.

David Hayward

Speaker

David Hayward (they/he) has worked in production management for events and festivals since 2006. They have co-founded several grassroots organisations including an art gallery and Nottingham Hackspace, one of the largest hackspaces in Europe. They are currently production manager for Place Heath Technology CIC, working on PlaceCal.

Manchester Age Friendly Neighbourhoods conducted 6,000 conversations and divested £200,000 to four neighbourhoods in Manchester, UK. We found an overwhelming feeling in each area that “there’s nothing to do in my area!”.

To combat this, we developed a combined social and technical intervention called PlaceCal that worked with partners in a resident-led age friendly partnership. Rather than creating “yet another app”, we trained people up to list events using their existing software (Google Calendar, Outlook, Facebook, Eventbrite, etc), got all the local institutions working together, and created the PlaceCal platform to aggregate all this information and sort it into multiple hyperlocal community-owned sites.

This workshop will share our experiences getting dozens of partners in a variety of contexts to work together to collectively overcome barriers to digital and social inclusion. We will share some tips on how to use existing free and open source software to do it that you are probably already paying for. And we will outline our vision for the future of the open source nonprofit PlaceCal platform and how you can use it in your neighbourhood.