On 22 November 2015 at 22:15, RottinRob . <rottinrob@gmail.com> wrote:

Yes, I could agree I'm probably missing the point on the MeetUp aspect as I never been accused of being social! However, I do have full appreciation of the amount of effort, work, and code that goes into what I'm suggesting. Grossly simplified...absolutly!

TL;DR: The network effects of lock-in based platform designs are hard to overcome, but there are glimmers of hope in the increasing technical sophistication of local governments.

Long version:

A useful piece of background info for any work in the social networking space is Metcalfe's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe's_law

This was originally used in the context of phone and fax networks, and is summarised as "the value of the network increases with the square of the number of the devices connected to it". A phone network with only one device connected isn't a network, while one with 100 devices connected is on the order of *100* times more valuable to its collective userbase than one with only 10 devices (since its 10 times more valuable for each participant, and there are 10 times as many participants). It's debatable whether the simple "value is proportional to the square of the number of nodes" is accurate, but the general principle of a non-linear relationship between the number of participants and the aggregate value of the network holds.

It's those network effects which are then responsible for most of the barriers to entry for new services in connecting people to each other.

Returning to the specific case of community user groups, at the individual meetup level (if the meetup is actively trying to grow), that means the choice of organisational tools boils down to 3 major considerations:

* usability for the meetup organisers

* lowering barriers to entry for new attendees

* improving discoverability for potential attendees in the area

Meetup.com arguably represents the state of the art in relation to the last two considerations (at least in countries where English is the primary spoken language), which then creates a self-reinforcing cycle, where groups want to be on Meetup to benefit from the last two aspects, and hence the first aspect becomes "Are we going to use anything else *in addition to* meetup.com?", rather than being able to readily opt out of meetup.com entirely.

This means that even a more comprehensive solution that brought in a more capable ticketing system like Eventbrite's, an improved social media management platform like Hootsuite, and improved calendar integration with things like Facebook Events, Google Calendar and Office 365, would still have to figure out how they were going to overcome meetup.com's network effects.

That's not to say it couldn't be done, though. If I was going to try to build something like that, I'd start by talking to local governments, especially council libraries, find out what systems they were currently using to collect and communicate event data, and see what might be involved in enabling them to consume meetup.com data feeds. That would create the opportunity to leverage the growing influence of "open government" groups by working directly with folks for whom ensuring the vibrancy of the local community *is* their day job (or at least part of it). Get these kinds of "HyperLocal" information aggregation platform widely adopted to the point where a lot of folks are getting their local community meetup information from sites operated by their local government rather than directly from commercial sites, and you've decoupled the data entry network of group organisers from the data consumption network of group attendees, breaking the network lock-in effect, and opening up the group organisation tools market to increased competition again.

A bit of hunting on Google shows Portland's Calagator as a basic example of this idea: http://calagator.org/

That's a fairly basic calendar feed aggregator, though, clearly designed for an already technical audience: https://github.com/calagator/calagator/wiki/Supported-Import-Formats

A more well developed version of the idea targeting a more general audience would be Brisbane's community events calendar: http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/whats-on/type

And specifically for a technical audience, there's the Digital Brisbane events calendar: http://digitalbrisbane.com.au/Events

However, neither of the latter two examples is open source as far as I know, and neither republishes meetup.com data feeds.

This is the kind of poking around that suggest that there's a *huge* amount of untapped potential in more effective collaboration between the open source community and local governments, even though actively pursuing that isn't going to appeal to everyone as a possible career path.

Cheers,

Nick.

Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia