[Herts] Mashing up the LUG

[Tony Friis]

I agree we should get the website going.

Should we not first decide where our main site will be.
I had the impression that the LUG site we are using is a bit fragile and 
we may not have the control we would like.

I notice that the domain name " hertslug.org.uk " (without the dot) is 
available. perhaps we should use a bit of our cash to grab it and get 
full control of what we want - pointing to it from the main lug site. 
We'd then also have control over the subdomains, I'm sure we could find 
a use for them.

I'd like to see a wiki style facility ASAP and would be happy to help 
set up a moinmoin wiki if that's acceptable. (I need to do it anyway for 
another purpose).
If not that then lets start a Google group for the interim, which 
includes a mailing list and a sort of a wiki. Again I'm happy to 
contribute the effort. On the other hand perhaps some of Steve's 
suggestions include these facilities already.

I think the next step is to put together a specific proposal, which we 
can get agreement on for implementation.

Tony

PS Openstreetmap seems to have gone a bit nuts in Aston (S.E.Stevanage)

Steve Clark wrote:
> We've talked before about revamping the LUG web site, but we don't seem to 
> have got anywhere as yet. I would just like to make some suggestions, some of 
> which I have mentioned before:
> 
> 1. We're into open projects, so we should try and show them support. The 
> OpenStreetmap project has really come along in the last year or so. Their 
> coverage of Stevenage is pretty good, so perhaps our map to show the meeting 
> location should come from there now. You can see it at
> 
> http://openstreetmap.org/?lat=51.88936734398042&lon=-0.1718201749844773&zoom=15
> 
> I can see it's missing a few minor roads compared with the existing one, but 
> maybe we could do a mapping session one month to remedy that. I know a couple 
> of people at least have a GPS.
> 
> 2. Also on the mapping front, I think we should drop the Frappr link. It's 
> another non-open system. Ages ago I managed to make a Google map of some 
> members based on metadata embedded in their web sites
> 
> http://bagofspoons.net/map/gmap.html
> 
> I know Google are not as open as we might like, but they happen to have the 
> best free mapping API for now. Maybe OpenStreetmap will add something similar 
> one day. Meanwhile, if more people added the GeoURL data to their sites and 
> we got the member list page up to date, we could have our own map that we 
> fully control.
> 
> 3. A common feature in various open source communities is the Planet blog 
> aggregator. A few of us have blogs with RSS/ATOM feeds and some of us to 
> subscribe to each other. There are also other sources of similar data such as 
> Last.fm (music listening), del.icio.us (bookmarks), Flickr etc. A nice site 
> to bring those all together is
> 
> http://mugshot.org/
> 
> A bonus is that it's open source, from Red Hat. They have concepts of contacts 
> and groups. We could start a Herts LUG group. There are alternatives like 
> Facebook, but I don't like the proprietary nature of these. 
> 
> Okay, I just wanted to get those thoughts into the open. Any comments, 
> suggestions, criticisms are welcome.
>