The Return of Upcoming.org, An Arts and Technology Events Community Website

Upcoming.org is an arts and technology events community website originally founded by Andy Baio in 2003. The website was acquired by Yahoo in 2005, and was eventually closed in 2013 — long after Baio stopped having anything to do with it.

After the website closed, the Upcoming.org domain was sold back to Baio by Yahoo, and now Baio is raising funds via a Kickstarter project to bring the website and community back. In addition to building a new site for the same purpose, Baio intends to restore an archive of all the old event data that had been saved by the Internet Archive from the Yahoo-owned Upcoming.org — the first attempt to bring back anything of the sort that’s been archived like that.

Baio explains his reasons for bringing the site back:

Like many of the people that used it, I miss Upcoming. Nothing’s come to replace it in the years since, and I have the same problems that motivated me to build it a decade ago—I’m missing interesting events in my city and struggling to discover interesting events when I travel. I don’t know what my friends are going to, and I lose track of the events I hear about on a regular basis.

I want to bring back Upcoming, rebuilding it for the modern era using tools and platforms that weren’t available at the time I started it. I started Upcoming long before Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, or OAuth.

Yahoo proactively reached out to me, and sold me back the http://t.co/yFZzVxtPxm domain. Huge, huge kudos to them for making it happen.

— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) May 7, 2014

via Andy Baio