Exploring event co-creation at atproto.science 2026

Experimenting with event co-creation on the ATmosphere using leaflet.pub in the lead-up to ATProto.science 2026 (Vancouver, March 2026).

This is written in support of Event co-creation on the Atmosphere, so if you landed on this page directly, you might want to pop up there for the wider context. TL:DR; I'm exploring how standard.site could support event co-creation, and so thought I'd run a little experiment in the run up to ATProto.science (Vancouver, March 2026) using the leaflet.pub implementation of standard.site.

The atproto.science organisers had already asked participants to submit event items (presentations, demos, lightning talks), selected the most interesting ones, and organised them into a conference programme (workshops composed of 3-4 event items).

While the scope for event co-creation is limited (the selection, after all, has already been made) I thought it could be interesting to see whether we could use Leaflet and Bluesky to support conversations about the event programme in the run-up to the event.

Process

In mid February I started publishing the selected proposals into a Leaflet publication, with one subpage per presentation. My first attempt wasn't great, so Ariel Lighty joined in to improve the presentation, and eventually it was moved to ATScience's dedicated Leaflet publication.

Pretty soon we will invite the workshop speakers to:

• further flesh out their ideas (leaflet allows us to provide them an edit link)
• provoke a conversation - on Leaflet and/or Bluesky - with participants interested in their workshop.

Hopefully some of the speakers will have some interesting conversations in the run-up to their workshop, which will enrich the workshop for all concerned.

And, in a perfect world, the speakers in each workshop would also work together to find the threads connecting their respective event items and elaborate a full workshop description.

Managing expectations

Will that happen? As I write this I have no idea - that's why it's an experiment, which is appropriate enough, given that it's atproto.science.

I already know that this implementation won't be perfect. Several limitations are already clear:

• the author of the content will get the notifications of comments, not the speakers. This is a limitation of how it's set up using Leaflet, but I imagine it's not an issue for standard.site, where encoding each author's DID in the event item should ensure notifications go to the right place (?)
• There aren't (yet) any notifications when a Leaflet is mentioned on Bluesky, or your Bluesky ID is mentioned on Leaflet

The upshot of this is that the speakers will have to visit their Leaflet subpage to stay on top of comments and Bluesky conversations about their event item (although if they subscribe to their page, they'll see the latter via their Leaflet Reader custom feed).

But even if there is very little interaction, at the very least I will have learnt a little bit about how Leaflet and standard.site works, which is directly relevant to my atproto.science workshop (Your research institution in the Atmosphere).

So if you can't make it to my workshop, let's chat about it online via the above subpage. And if you can, let me know what you'd like to bring to the discussion when we meet face2face.

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