Re: helping physical semweb communities?

In follow up to Eric Miller's message about local SemWeb communities.

Hi, my name is Indra and I was the Melbourne, Australia Semantic Web 
Meetup organiser, until meetup.com introduced a monthly fee of USD$9.00 
for hosting our community.

I became a Semantic Web Meetup member first, after seeing a blog entry 
about one of the other communities. I later volunteered as a local 
organiser, when meetup.com initiated the organiser role for each community.

As a meetup.com organiser, you become responsible for promoting the 
community, as well as co-ordinating meetings and moderating the BB and 
other information sources.

The challenges from my perspective are in the long term committment of 
members and organisers.

As Charles indicated in his reply, an organiser (or someone else) needs 
to be at all face-to-face meetings to help provide the community with a 
sense of stability. Leandro mentions the need to provide a log of events 
so that you can keep members informed, interested and motivated, even 
when they are unable to actively participate (attend meetings).

I am attempting to keep the Melbourne Semantic Web community alive and 
out of debt. In response to the payment being requested by meetup.com I 
setup a BB as a substitute. Whilst the members of our community have 
been sent an email with details of the new site, so far none have moved 
across.

If there is anyone from other SemWeb communities out there (anywhere in 
the world), I'd really welcome suggestions, proposals or morale support.

Regards,
Indra
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Indra Chandon
Semantia Pty Ltd
PO Box 7301
St Kilda Road, Victoria 8004
AUSTRALIA
Tel: + 61 3 9419 9773
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