User Group Pages

[lornajane]

There's lots of excitement on twitter about this feature, but I'm not
sure I really understand how it would work so I'm kicking off this
thread in the hope of getting more than 140 chars from people on the
subject.

To start you off, Shaun put this on the joind.in wiki today:
User Group Pages
Allow User groups to set up a page for talks. Like an event but for
user groups. Could have other user group specific information on it.

So is it something that groups talks? Groups events? Instead of
events? Can users belong to it? Help me here :)

Lorna

[Bradley Holt]

Lorna,

I'm not sure if this is what Shaun was envisioning, but this is how I
would see a User Group Page working:

* One Joind.in "event" for the user group for all time (this could be
programmed as a "super" event if it's easier).
* The user group event can be setup on a repeating schedule and/or a
custom calendar (sometimes user group events happen outside the
regular schedule). The key point here is that each user group event is
somehow linked together with other events from the same user group
(perhaps "next" meeting and "previous" meeting links).
* Sessions have a date and time. At least for our user group, there's
only ever one talk per event so creating an event for every user group
meeting seems awkward.

Does that help?

Thanks,
Bradley

--
http://bradley-holt.com/

[Rafael Dohms]

I think there is space for a User Group type event, but i'm not sure
how different it would be from regular events, except for how they
would be listed.

I'll expand more after i come back from lunch :P

[Chris Cornutt]

I could see it being useful for events that recur like user group meetings but not quite as useful for the larger events that may only have something once a year. I do like the "belong to" aspect though - that leads to all sorts of new social interaction types.

I'm not sure grouping talks would be useful, though. Speakers already have their listing of sessions they've claimed...

-chris

--
Senior Editor
PHPDeveloper.org
ccor...@phpdeveloper.org

[Bittarman]

Sounds like an awsome feature to have,

I'd like to suggest that it includes some geo-data too, so people can
start searching for groups near them in the future, perhaps also using
the google maps api

[jclermont]

I agree with Bradley. The main thing that I would like to see added is
to have an umbrella for all our group's specific events. There would
be one heading for "Milwaukee PHP User Group" and then there would be
individual events underneath it for each of our meetings. This would
be useful for someone who stumbles across a single event to easily
explore and find future events.

I had originally requested "repeating events," but in hindsight that
doesn't address the problem of linking them together. We don't need to
say "this repeats every XX weeks" if we can simply have all events
linked together under one main User Group heading.

One final comment is that our events do typically have two topics. We
could lump them together in one description, but it would be nice to
have discrete pages for session 1 and session 2, especially for
feedback and ratings. I could live with it either way though.

We currently use meetup.com for a lot of these functions, but I would
much rather move it to joind.in. I think other user groups would as
well. If you haven't played around with meetup, it might be useful to
get inspiration for this feature. Our UG's page is here as an example:
http://www.meetup.com/Milwaukee-PHP-Users-Group/

Joel

[Jake Smith (jakefolio)]

I personally think KISS. The main focus of the site, from what I can
tell, is to get reviews/evaluations of presentations. I think meetup
is built around the concept of recurring meetings, and joind.in is
setup for 1 event -> n talks. If you allow an event type to be "user
group", you can get rid of start and end date. Simply 1 never ending
event with talks that represent each meeting.

This IMO, is the simplest way to accomodate User Groups without
becoming meetup.com.

- Jake

[Shaun Farrell]

WOW.... Good discussion.. Thanks Lorna for posting this on the mailing list!

I think Bradley had hit the nail on the head with his description.  

I also think Jake has the best comment of all - KISS! If it was started off simple we can always add on to it later.

Some Features that I would love to see is 

• User Group Page with some metadata about the group.
• Recurring meetings and manual inputted meetings/event
• Ability to attach a speaker or a group of speakers to a meeting/event
• All the other basic features joind.in already has.

I don't think I would substitute this page for our meetup page though.  However, I think this will give visibility to our speakers.

<sparked-intrest>

I saw recently that Milwaukee user group was using Joind.In for this and it sparked some interest in me.  I am one of the Organizers of the DC PHP Usergroup and responsible for getting in speakers.  I got the question posed to me a couple of times by members that they send in proposals for conferences but never get chosen and they wanted to know why. I usually just point them to http://blog.calevans.com/2010/08/27/tips-on-how-to-get-accepted-as-a-speaker-at-a-php-conference/ 

But I think this feature would be excellent for user group speaker's to get rated on their talk so that when conference organizers are looking at proposals they might be able to reference Joind.In  Currently there is no good way to do this other than blog posts.

</sparked-intrest>

Shaun J. Farrell
Washington, DC

[Rafael Dohms]

The UG Admins group has already started talks about a User Group
listing site.
So one that would have geo information and all that.

I agree that joind.in should be KISS, and stay on focus, but i think
we have webservices on our side, so we should start joining in with
other products. This would be a great idea to revive the UG site and
have it interact with joind.in on some level, adding basic UG info to
joind.in but keeping the rest offsite.

Another such example is that the PHPSP UG is developing a call for
papers software which we plan in the future to work in interaction
with joind.in

So like the ideia of "belongs to" and sorting but i don;t think the
geo-location and UG registration should come into joind.in, but rather
it should consume from somewhere.

On Sep 24, 1:37 pm, Shaun Farrell <farrel...@gmail.com> wrote:
> WOW.... Good discussion.. Thanks Lorna for posting this on the mailing list!
> I think Bradley had hit the nail on the head with his description.
> I also think Jake has the best comment of all - KISS! If it was started off
> simple we can always add on to it later.
>
> Some Features that I would love to see is
>

>    - User Group Page with some metadata about the group.
>    - Recurring meetings and manual inputted meetings/event
>    - Ability to attach a speaker or a group of speakers to a meeting/event
>    - All the other basic features joind.in already has.

>
> I don't think I would substitute this page for our meetup page though.
>  However, I think this will give visibility to our speakers.
>
> <sparked-intrest>
> I saw recently that

> Milwaukee<http://www.meetup.com/Milwaukee-PHP-Users-Group/> user

> group was using Joind.In for this and it sparked some interest in me.  I am
> one of the Organizers of the DC PHP Usergroup and responsible for getting in
> speakers.  I got the question posed to me a couple of times by members that
> they send in proposals for conferences but never get chosen and they wanted

> to know why. I usually just point them tohttp://blog.calevans.com/2010/08/27/tips-on-how-to-get-accepted-as-a-...

[lornajane]

My goodness, this is an excellent response. Thanks everyone for your
comments!!

For the record, events do have geo location at the moment, and the
events page and the iphone app show locations of individual events.
Maybe it would be nice to have a map showing where in the world ALL
our events are?

I wonder if there is something here that is as simple as categorising
or tagging events, so that we can give links to all the events for a
given category/tag - and the user groups can adopt their own hashtags
to use and see them all listed on one page.

Speakers could also belong to the same category system - perhaps to
keep it under control we could only have an approved list or
something? My concern with doing it this way is slowing everything
down by having to search by tag - as the data sets on joind.in get
bigger, those functions are starting to slow down (as you may have
noticed in places!). It does get away from hacking too much with the
existing event/talk setup though, which are pretty stable and will
still represent the majority of the site use (I think)

This wouldn't cover the user groups having their own pages - but most
of them have their own sites anyway and will link back from the events
they run. We could add something to event templates to help users
explore the other events with the same tag, to make it a bit more
social perhaps? (open to suggestions on that one)

Am I onto something or am I missing the point?

Lorna

[Michelangelo van Dam]

Sorry to be late at the party, and I see some great ideas merging from the discussions here. I only wonder why there's a need for an extra functionality? PHPBenelux uses joindin for a couple of years to announce their meetings and claim feedback for the speakers on these events. Never thought about needing something specific for us as a user group.

OK, each event (meeting, workshop, event) might have one or two talks, but that works for us. It also keeps our UG popping up in the list of upcoming events, so extra "branding" exposure.

Like I said, I don't really see why there's a need for something extra. As Raphael explained, there are several listings already that contains all details of UG's (by Ben Ramsey, Zend and php.net). And his idea to use joind.in's API is something I really like as you can integrate joind.in right there on your UG's website.

What might be a good addition is to either integrate the meetup.com, facebook.com, whatever.com meeting announcement or to provide a link to it. Doing API stuff on these "event sites" might be tricky and a lot of work as there are already so many API's in use that you need to pick just a few most common. But with KISS in mind, just adding the link would be more than enough (as we have right now).

My $ 0.02,

Mike

[Michelangelo van Dam]

would it be ok if we have "upcoming", "hot", "passed" and "UG upcoming" as shortlink filters on the event listing page

[lornajane]

On the basis that nobody actually built this, I guess it wasn't a
vitally needed feature! I think we agreed that it would be a nice
touch to be able to tag events - allowing usergroups to link to a
search showing only events with their tag, for example, but also we
could tag PHP events as these are getting harder to find as the site
gets more widely adopted by other events and users! Once the data is
in there, people can do whatever they like with either the site or the
API.

I am not against integration with other sites but I think we need to
be careful of adding too many features that would only appeal to a
small proportion of users - because then of course we have to support
them!

Perhaps it would be better to be able to search by tag, rather than
adding any very specific links to the existing event page.

Lorna