Open Stack

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/groups-portal-contrib-guide.md

HTH
stef