How MamboMap stays accurate.

We're a directory of Latin dance socials and festivals worldwide. Here's exactly how we collect and verify every listing.

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Every event in the directory carries a sourceUrl field that points to where the editor verified the listing. Usually that's the organizer's own page — a venue website, an Instagram post, a Facebook event, or a regional aggregator like salsavida.com or latindancecalendar.com. When two independent sources confirm the same time and venue, that's the bar we prefer; one good first-party source is the minimum.

You can see verification in practice on any event page — for example, the editor's pick Latin Fridays at Lula Lounge in Toronto links straight back to lula.ca where the schedule lives. If the source ever moves or goes dark, the listing is flagged for re-audit before it ages another week.

Every event and city carries a verifiedAt timestamp — the date an editor last confirmed the schedule against its source. Weekly socials go stale after 90 days without a re-check; festivals after 30 days, because dates and ticket links shift faster as the event approaches.

The audit runs city-by-city on a rolling cadence — the longest-untouched city is reviewed first. Wrong dates, dead links, closed venues, or a moved social all push the city back to the top of the queue. You can see the live status of every city, sorted by last-audit date, on the per-city freshness dashboard.

We also treat the organizer's Instagram as the canonical source for tonight's status. Organizers post there constantly — venue swaps, weather cancellations, lineup changes — and our database can't move at that speed. When our last verified date is older than the threshold, every event card and event page surfaces a tappable IG link so you can confirm before you go. We do not scrape Instagram or claim to know what was posted; the link is the hand-off to the canonical source.

• We don't review or rate events. No star ratings, no comments, no leaderboards. The directory tells you what's on, not what we think of it.
• We don't auto-scrape. Every listing is added by hand. Scraped data ages badly and reads as untrustworthy — both to dancers and to crawlers.
• We don't paywall the data. Listings are free for organizers and free to read. Featured slots on the festivals page are paid placements, clearly disclosed there.
• We don't speak languages other than English yet. Listings can be in any country, but the interface is English-only at launch. Translation is on the roadmap, not the bench.

MamboMap is currently a small operation. The directory is edited by Jason Lam (founder), with a rotating set of volunteer editors covering specific cities and regions.

Want to maintain your city or region? We'd love the help — email submissions@mambomap.com with the city you want to cover and one or two events you'd add first.