[Durham] website refresh / wordpress-themed club night

[Oliver Burnett-Hall]

On 06/01/16 11:28, mark wrote:
> It certainly seems like a lot of other groups are using Meetup these
> days, so it's worth considering.
>
> These are some of my thoughts about it:
>
> - do we have to either have our own site or a Meetup group? They have
> quite different functions so maybe one shouldn't exclude the other.

No, they're certainly not exclusive.

> - if we were to keep something under our own control at nelug.org.uk, we
> could change it to a simpler, static site or we could at least have a
> locked front page (rather than a weblog) that doesn't look out-of-date
> so easily, which would be very easy to do.

Agreed.

> - if we want to use a group event management/publicity service, there
> are alternatives to Meetup. For example, I've recently been helping some
> groups to develop a Radar presence , e.g.[1]

I'd not come across Radar. It looks like it would be a viable option for 
organising meetings, but we'd be missing out of the large user base that 
Meetup has, and the visibility the group would gain with local users.

> - I don't use Meetup, not solely because it uses proprietary code, but
> because I don't want my behavioural data to be commodified.

As these things go, I don't get the impression that Meetup is too bad -- 
it appears to have a viable business model based on organisers' 
subscription fees, so doesn't include advertising and I hope that it has 
less incentives to flog off all its users' data.

 > If you set
> up a Meetup group but some of us don't participate in it, would that be
> OK or would that cause problems? e.g. you wouldn't really know how many
> attendees to expect at events because you wouldn't know how many
> curmudgeons like myself would be coming ;)

I'm definitely not proposing that a Meetup account would be a 
requirement for attending meetings.

- olly