RedCal a set of publically accessible calendar feeds. When you subscribe, events from your chosen feeds appear in your calendar application of choice alongside your personal calendar events. The feeds are created and managed by different organizations engaged in radical politics.
In technical terms - it's a privately hosted CalDAV server. CalDAV being an internet technology defined in 2007 that enables the synchronization of calendar data between multiple devices.
Organizations are granted write access to the calendar, meaning they can update it with events. Individual users have read-only access meaning they can see the events that have been published but cannot modify them.
Whilst RedCal is password protected, we must assume it is infltrated, and hence, no private information is shared on it at all.
RedCal came about due to a few observations.
The first relates to the prevalence of social media usage within political organizing. These online spaces are driven by algorithms that are designed for profit and heavily monitored. RedCal offers a means of staying aware of important events happening locally, without the need for social media.
The second is the usefulness of seeing events data directly in a calendar format, as opposed to a poster / text format that you may see on social media or a group-chat. Being able to see events in this way has been helpful with our organizing so we decided to create RedCal as an experiment to see if it could help others.
Finally, RedCal was created as a response to the increasing monopoly that a small number of corporations have over the internet. It exists to demonstrate that the technologies required for us to define our own online spaces do exist and are there for us to use. If this project has given you any ideas that you would like to share and explore please, reach out. We would love to chat. Contact details are at the bottom of this page.
Subscribing to RedCal is simple, but will be slightly different depending on what kind of device (iPhone / Android / Windows / Mac / Linux) you are subscribing from.
A search for "CalDAV clients" will show you many options. Included below are guides for setting up the applications that we have had success with. Just bear in mind that they are not the only options.
Please ensure that you have secured your device using a strong passcode and disabled biometric login (fingerprint / FaceID etc) before using RedCal. This technology normalise the collection of data that no coropration or state should be collecting.