helping physical semweb communities?

I'm increasingly asked if there are communities of people getting 
together in various physical locations working on / learning about the 
Semantic Web.  I take this as a good and healthy sign of success, but 
my responses are spotty at best. And while I know about some regional 
groups (Bristol, Washington DC, Buenos Aires, Montreal, NY, Melbourne, 
etc.) what I don't know is the best way they have found to manage, 
organize, start such groups.

The next question people ask me is 'how can i start one?' and for this 
I'd really like to provide them some guidance. Are people using meetup 
[1]? is there something better? What have people found that works, what 
doesn't? My assumption at this point is that things are ad-hoc at best, 
but any advice, lessons-learned, etc. we can provide I believe will 
help jump-start a growing number of localized semweb groups.

Eventually, I think it would be cool to see each of these groups 
publish a bit or RDF describing themselves and plot them on a map [2]. 
Additionally, RSS feeds of relevant information collected, organized by 
geography, etc. would give a whole new dimension to something like 
"planet rdf" [3]. But at this point I'd be happy just to find out from 
others what they find that works. :)

Thought, input, feedback welcomed...

--
eric miller                              http://www.w3.org/people/em/
semantic web activity lead               http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/
w3c world wide web consortium            http://www.w3.org/

[1] http://semweb.meetup.com/
[2] http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/pim/travel
[3] http://planetrdf.com/

Received on Friday, 15 April 2005 13:49:37 UTC