Agreed that the value in meetup is the community around it. There are plenty of people that arrive at user group meetings that have never seen the OpenStack user group page. We are mining for future Openstack participation . I thought the groups tool being built by Martin was going to integrate with meetup and other sources of user group sharing rather than replace. Replacing would shrink our community and would impact the momentum of attracting new people. Can we discuss the group's portal implementation plan with the ambassadors to start and then the rest of the community? I am realizing that this is going to impact us in a big way and I don't know much about it. ~sean
On Sep 25, 2014, at 11:14 AM, Stefano Maffulli <stefano@openstack.org> wrote:
Hi Adam,
On 09/25/2014 05:29 AM, Adam Nelson wrote: I'm not a huge fan of Meetup.com's UX and too much email is definitely a problem too. This is a ripe area for disruption but unfortunately, nobody has disrupted it yet.
Is there a service that's better than Meetup.com? I would gladly try it out.
meetup.com has fairly trivial functionalities but that's not its value. From the functionalities perspective, there is a plan to replicate them in http://groups.openstack.org (more on this later).
The value of meetup.com comes from the network effect: there is a large amount of people using meetup.com and when they join it they state their interest using 'keywords' and the geographic areas where they reside. When a new group is created within X miles, using those keywords, the person registered on meetup.com gets a notification. So people registed on meetup.com *and* interested in cloud get a notification of new OpenStack groups close to them.
This network effect is a lot harder to break than simply replicate or improve the UX.
Speaking of alternatives, our Groups portal can be used to host content for groups that don't want to use meetup.com or other systems. There are a couple of things that need to happen first:
1 - provide a system to authenticate users. 2 - provide a workflow management system to approve new groups
Task 1) is being blocked by a super task, the infamous OpenID provider described on this BP:
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/openstack-ci/+spec/sso-openid-provider
There is a lot of work being done by Marton to make the code deployable:
https://review.openstack.org/#/q/project:openstack-infra/openstackid,n,z
but the dev server is already capable of authenticating:
http://openstackid-dev.openstack.org/
the final home for the OpenID will be https://openstackid.org/
Once we have the OpenID provider, we'll be able to work on point 2) and increase capabilities of http://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack-infra/groups. Being based on Drupal there shouldn't be major blockers to replicate what meetup.com has.
If you have time and are skilled in php/drupal coding, we may want to create a branch to start experimenting using groups-dev.openstack.org and authenticating against openstackid-dev.
Tips on how to contribute to Drupal-based groups is on:
http://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack-infra/groups-static-pages/tree/group...
HTH stef
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