[PSF-Community] Looking for alternatives to meetup.com

[Nick Coghlan]

On 22 November 2015 at 22:15, RottinRob . <rottinrob at 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 at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
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