This is my (joelgalvez.com) selection of newsletters. Most events are related to the arts and new media in The Netherlands, with some focus on Amsterdam, since that's where I live. This is meant to be one local initiative among many others.

The long-term goal is to create a kind of a funnel for event data into the fediverse. You might have heard of Mastodon, a decentralized alternative to X/Twitter. There are similar initiatives for event data, such as Gancio and Mobilizon. Most of the events I personally care about are not available in the fediverse, but all of them already exist in the form of email newsletters.

Here's how this works: whenever I receive a newsletter, I send an automated response with all the events I found in it. The sender can review the events, check if they look okay, and then choose to publish. I can help with adjustments if needed. Nothing gets published without human review, but this is much quicker than manually filling in all the information.

This is also an experiment in using AI responsibly: not treating its output as truth, but as a draft or proposal. The model is runs in a kind of a jail—it can't communicate with the outside world. It's also a way to experiment with smaller, more efficient models to gain independence from larger infrastructure and resource-intensive data centers. I can track energy use and be transparent about it. A small model trained specifically for event data could be quite efficient, for example.