Re: helping physical semweb communities?

On Fri, 15 Apr 2005 15:49:52 +0200, Eric Miller <em@w3.org> wrote:

> ... 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?

Hi Eric,

I've used meetup to find some groups that happened to be in places I was  
going, which I thnk is useful. Any tool that helps people to put down  
markers is good - it would indeed be nice to have some RDF tools that did  
this - or even see meetup provide RDF capability with nice interfaces to  
it.

In other cases just casual calls on mailing lists can work ad hoc.

On the other hand a lot of what drives any group of people to hang  
together is about general social interaction. Having a style of  
communication that doesn't make people feel excluded, but gives a sense of  
belonging. Having a place and time for meeting that suits people. Having  
something to talk about. Like mailing lists, if you don't get a response  
most people will just stop bothering...

Perhaps one of the very biggest things is having somebody who is prepared  
to turn up every time to every meeting, welcome people, answer the same  
questions from another person, and ensure that somehow the meeting seems  
worth returning to. Not an easy job, and not one I know how to explain -  
although I recognise it when I see it...

> 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].

We actually discussed this at the Melbourne Meetup group meeting, and it  
would indeed be cool. I'd like to see physical communities developing some  
of this stuff and then showing it off (but where? how?). There are also  
neat tools out there.

Blessings on the FOAF world for making some tools that make it easy to  
start this kind of thing with a useful example or 3.

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile                      Fundacion Sidar
charles@sidar.org   +61 409 134 136    http://www.sidar.org

Received on Sunday, 17 April 2005 10:24:02 UTC