Re: helping physical semweb communities?

Hi Eric,

I was the organizer of Buenos Aires semantic web meetup group [1] while I
was living there. So yes, at least we were using meetup. As you may know,
meetup is about to charge you as the organizer a monthly fee, so I don't
know what is going to happen with these groups.

I'll tell you how did I start the group: after the workshop we had in
Buenos Aires [2] I thought it would be useful to have some way to keep in
contact with those people, and I already knew about meetup, so it looked
like a good place to start. While I was in Buenos Aires, we have 4 or 5
succesful meetups. I've tried to write a brief log after every meeting. I
think this was useful, at least for me [3].

In my personal experience I can say that keeping in contact with a regular
basis with the members of the group helps you a lot to have a successful
semweb group. Also encouraging people to participate, or at least to show
up in the selected venue is another good thing to do. The Meetup Organizer
Center [4] has a lot of tips to run a group.

Finally, I've published that little RDF [5][6] about the group you asked
for :) It's handmade, so it isn't perfect, but I agree with you, having a
semantic web group without semantic information about it it's nonsense. I
even thought proposing this as an extension to Meetup.

This is my personal experience. I hope it's useful to you and somebody
else. It'd be nice to have these experiences documented somewhere (a wiki
page maybe?).

[1] http://semweb.meetup.com/1/
[2] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/dev_workshop_report_8/
[3] http://f14web.com.ar/inkel/2004/12/09/web-semantica-en-buenos-aires.html
[4] http://orc.meetup.com/
[5] http://f14web.com.ar/inkel/2004/12/10/meetup.n3
[6] http://f14web.com.ar/inkel/2004/12/10/meetup.xrdf

-- 
inkel
Leandro Mariano López
F14: http://f14web.com.ar/
weblog: http://f14web.com.ar/inkel/blog/
MSN: inkel.ar@gmail.com
ICQ: 68476573
Yahoo: inkel_rss
Movil: (+34) 695.084.343

Received on Monday, 18 April 2005 08:56:27 UTC