@danieldekay

Here’s an idea for making my home tango community better. I have provided the regional calendar since 2007, and it contains a calendar of milongas, workshops, and some lessons, a list of announcements, and everything together not just as a portal website, but also as a regular weekly newsletter that gives an update on what events will happen in the next 10 days, but also contains the newest announcements by the community.

The biggest challenge here is to get the cooperation of all organizers and teachers to enter their content, or to at least publish it in some place that can be easily checked. Unfortunately, they don’t all do that: some only have email distribution lists or newsletters; others only use facebook, and others have nice web sites.

I have long wanted to automate a lot of the work needed, but automation requires machine-readable access to the data. The approaches I am looking at are:

1. Utilize generative AI. I have experimented with this already for my other event calendar project, and there’s a Python script that takes events shared on Facebook and parses their data to fill in the metadata we have in the TMD database. It also reads the event websites and links DJs with events, and even writes a summary of the event. It’s not perfect, but saves a lot of manual time, and it helps to maintain a good level of data quantity and quality.
   • For RNT I could do the same. Parse websites. Offer an email address that can be fed with event announcements, and the AI would post the events to RNT automatically. It could even ask questions and send an email for clarification if needed. Or be accessible as a chat bot.
2. Get RSS feeds of announcements and events from the local organizers and teachers, and add them into the feed on RNT. But this would require the whole tango scene to upgrade their websites. It’s been long needed, but they seem to be OK with what they have.
3. If a teacher would be willing to switch to WordPress, they could even cross-post to RNT using this plugin.