[Grassroots-l] promoting user group meetings on the wiki

[S Page]

(Is this the right mailing list for user group coordinators?  If not, 
please forward and let me know.)

wiki.laptop.org has an events list that gets updated automatically with 
info from any page that has the semantic annotation "start date".

If user groups added the following to their wiki page:

   == Next meeting ==
   Saturday, December 20, 10am - 1pm  Gallaudet University Washington, 
D.C USA

in the form of

Saturday [[Start date::December 20, 2008 10am]] - 1pm
Gallaudet University
[[Has location city::Washington, D.C]]
[[Has location country::USA]]

then you can see that the user group shows up in
<http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Events#Upcoming_events_on_wiki.laptop.org>

I think this is a useful low-maintenance way to give user group meetings 
more visibility.  You don't have to make a new page for each meeting 
(unless you want to create "XO Springfield/2008-12-20 meeting" with 
agenda, notes, etc.).

NOTES
* MediaWiki is pretty flexible about parsing dates, it'll show you in a 
"Facts about ..." box how it interpreted the date.
* Be sure to include the year!
* I would advise against timezones.
* There's an [[End date:] property as well, but it's overkill unless 
your meeting goes on for days ;-)


Contact me if you have questions.
Is there a wiki page guiding people in setting up a user group wiki page?


Dear "OLPC Learning Club D.C.", I hope it's alright I hijacked your page 
for this experiment!

--
=S Page   user:skierpage   just a volunteer