The idea
Finding things to do in a city is a solved problem if you want a stadium concert. It is an unsolved problem if you want the weekly knitting circle, the mycology club, the civic meeting — the recurring, cheap, show-up-alone events where strangers become regulars and regulars become friends. Those live on hundreds of separate venue calendars, library systems, parks feeds, and Instagram accounts that no one aggregates well.
This site is the visible end of an engine that tries to pull every event in the city into one place and judge each one for community potential — not hype.
Where the events come from
A registry of every event-emitting place we know about (venues, organizers, aggregators), each connected to the channel where it actually posts. Scrapers are built per platform, not per venue — one adapter for The Events Calendar covers every WordPress site running it; one Squarespace adapter covers every Squarespace venue. Every pipeline must pass a live test before it counts as built, and a maintenance job re-checks the fleet so dead feeds get marked dead instead of silently lying.
How events are scored
Each event is rated 1–10 by an LLM on six dimensions that describe the event itself, the same for every viewer:
- social quality — will attendees interact, or sit in an audience?
- serendipity — crowd diversity; odds of an unexpected encounter
- solo-friendliness — can a stranger show up alone and meet people?
- community building — does going regularly build something durable?
- uniqueness — rare one-off vs. a regular thing
- value for price — fair for what you get; free counts in its favor
The score you see is a weighted composite. The weights are editable without re-scoring anything, which means different personas (a frugal community-seeker weighs things differently than a novelty-hunter) cost nothing to add.
Why ↻ joinable matters most
Community is not a property of an event — it's a property of repetition. You don't make friends at an event; you make them the fourth time you show up to the same weekly thing and the regulars recognize you. So the engine detects recurring series from pure date math (a weekly bridge club has 7-day gaps; a theater run has nightly ones — only the first is something you can join) and the map and list both have a ↻ Joinable filter that shows only those.
What's honestly missing
Coverage is measured, not assumed — and it isn't complete. Most of what's missing lives on Instagram and paper flyers: run clubs, DIY shows, mutual-aid dinners. That's the next frontier. Costs are also only as good as the source data; most venue calendars don't publish prices, so "free only" undercounts free events.