Wednesday, September 12, 2012

PyGrunn community site

Yesterday at the Monthly PyGrunn meeting we decided to make www.pygrunn.nl the central hub for all things PyGrunn. The question is how to turn this site into a real community site. Currently PyGrunners are sharing using a mailinglist, LinkedIn, twitter, pygrunn.nl, Google+ and facebook. Let's start the discussion: What kind of site should we create for the PyGrunn community? A few requirements: - Everybody should be able to contribute to the site; - It should be simple to schedule events (Monthly PyGrunn for instance) to which community members can sign up; - It should be easy to connect posts to social media; - ... The current site is built on top of AppEngine and Django, but there are also Facebook and G+ pages.

5 comments:

  1. Hi all!

    I want to do a small list of all the "services" that we are using:

    - Google Plus: https://plus.google.com/109801884397590903747/posts
    - LinkedIn group: http://www.linkedin.com/groups/PyGrunn-monthly-Python-Groningen-Users-4197937?trk=myg_ugrp_ovr
    - Twitter: https://twitter.com/pygrunn
    - Mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/pygrunn-monthly
    - Calendar: https://www.google.com/calendar/render?cid=tmo92883rkffbo2v9m1jt629lg%40group.calendar.google.com
    - This site.

    I know that they are a lot but basically we were using LinkedIn almost for all.

    My solution:

    - Install a proper CMS at pygrunn.nl [1] that automatically post the news to PyGrunn at Google+ (is this possible? Last time that I check the API was read-only) & to the twitter account.
    - The calendar shouldn't be needed because if we use Google Events for create the event, the appointment will be added to your calendar.
    - The LinkedIn group will be deprecated.
    - The mailing list will be used mainly to the team that will on the pygrunn site.

    [1] We can use a lot of != CMS here, let's discuss it. For me the main requeriments are:

    - Allow login with an actual account (this means, fb, twitter, google...)
    - Good permissions: who can add what in the site.
    - Allow a 100% change on the style.

    This CMS doesn't need to be hosted by us, it can be blogger, WP or whatever other thing that you want (if it's python flavored better :p)

    We can base our design on the one made by Oleg for past years, but we should try to remove the yearly brand and do it more abstract.

    So... what do you think?

    I will send a mail to the mailing list just now with a link to this post & I will post it at LinkedIn too!

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  2. I frankly don't care so much which tools we use, but would like:

    - some place for news & discussions
    - an 'event' platform where people can say: "I will be present"
    - user profiles so I can see who's who

    To get this with the least amount of effort (of both hosting software & having users create/maintain accounts/profiles) I prefer either LinkedIn for everything (group & events & profile) or Google (group & calendar & g+ profiles). Facebook could also work.

    It would be great to get a feed of this data, or pointers to it at pygrunn.nl , but I wouldn't install our own community software...

    I've heard people that don't want to be on "evil" Google or LinkedIn, but I wonder if they want to be on any software installation at pygrunn.nl ...

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  3. Google Plus. It's easy and it works.

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  4. I agree with Ivor. We could just use Google+ for everything. The mailing list for the discussions and the google+ profiles so that Ivor can spy on other people! :)
    And of course google+ events for the actual events.

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  5. PyGrunners! I've setup a PyGrunn Google+ page here: https://plus.google.com/u/1/b/109801884397590903747/109801884397590903747/posts

    Please check it out and let me know whether you think it fits as a platform for the PyGrunn community. Yes, we will direct pygrunn.nl to this page if we all agree. :)
    As far as I'm concerned I think we should go ahead with Google+. It offers all the tools we need: events, pictures, videos, live broadcasting of video (!), (re)sharing, discussion, etc.

    Let me know what you think on the Google+ page!

    ReplyDelete