Open, shared data about cultural life.
CultureBlocs is an open format for cultural activity: what's on, what's made, and who went. Festivals, venues, artists and audiences publish records in their own accounts. Anyone can read them and build on them. There is nothing to sign up to.
Cultural information doesn't join up
What's on gets typed out again for every listings site, social post and ticket platform. Who made a work is spread across portfolios, press releases and credits that don't connect. What people went to, read or heard is held by whichever platform they used, or isn't recorded at all.
Each piece exists somewhere. Nobody can put them together without asking every platform for access.
CultureBlocs is a shared format for those pieces, so each can be published once by the person or organisation it belongs to, and read by anyone.
Three kinds of record
What's on
Festivals, venues and galleries publish their programme as open calendar records, in their own account. Any listings site or calendar app that reads the format can show it.
What's made
Artists and practitioners publish a CreativeID, a short profile of who they are and what they do, and a small record for each work. Portfolios, gallery sites and open-call forms can all read the same records.
Who went
Anyone can publish a bead: one small record that says I went to this, I read this, I watched this. It points at the event or work and lives in the person's own account. Nobody else holds it.
Records point at each other by address, and at works by shared identifiers such as Wikidata, ISBN or MusicBrainz. A work, the event where it was shown and the people who chose to say they saw it all connect, without any one organisation holding all of it.
An illustration. Three records, three publishers, joined by address.
Who publishes what
A festival or venue
Publishes its programme once, in its own account. It appears anywhere the format is read and is corrected in one place. People who came can point their own records at it, and the venue can see those public references without collecting anything about anyone.
An artist
Publishes a CreativeID and a record for each work. Her own site, a gallery's page and an open-call form can all read them, so she updates once.
Someone who went
Presses I went on a listing, or logs what they read, watched or heard. The record sits in their own account, and they can edit or delete it at any time.
A researcher, funder or listings editor
Reads published records across a city, a season or an art form. They show what was programmed and what people chose to share about it. That isn't a headcount, and it doesn't replace box-office figures.
A format, not a platform
There is no CultureBlocs account, no CultureBlocs database of your records, and nothing to sign up to. Records live in your own AT Protocol account, the same kind of account used by Bluesky, Blacksky, Eurosky and others, and they go wherever that account goes.
CultureBlocs maintains three things:
The format
Open schemas for creative and cultural records under
com.cultureblocs.*. Events use the shared community calendar
format, which we don't own.
Reference tools
Small apps that read and write the format. Use them, copy them, or build your own.
Examples
Event listings that show how saying I went could work. We compiled them from public announcements; the real version would sit on the organiser's own site.
Devices and prototypes live on the experiments page →
Alongside the apps you already use
If you already log music, books or films in another app on the same network, those records stay where they are. We're aligning with the identifiers those apps already use, so their records and beads can be read together and nobody has to log the same thing twice.
Private until you publish
Some tools keep records on your own devices until you choose to publish. Anything you publish is public, like a post. An I went record shows the event and the day. It doesn't include the time, your location or your device. You can edit or delete what you publish; services that have already read it may keep a copy.
Start somewhere
Keep the doors open
CultureBlocs doesn't take donations. It rests on the idea that everyone's cultural life counts, and access to the arts matters most for people who would never normally consider it for themselves. I support Arts Emergency for that reason. If CultureBlocs is useful to you, please think about giving to them.