[Lopsa-regional-project] chp/partner/affiliate

[Eric Eisenhart]

On Thu, Jan 19, 2006 at 03:48:39AM -0700, der.hans wrote:
> Partner: the organization has at least two LOPSA members and co-sponsors
> one event with LOPSA every year.

Oooh.  I like this idea...  Not sure exactly what "co-sponsors" means, but
let's not worry about that until we've actually figured out the Affiliate
idea.

> Affiliate: at least one LOPSA member acts as a liaison to the group. The
> relationship is mostly ad hoc co-promotion.
> 
> Does that make sense? Do we need another level?

I think that's enough levels.

> 1. create an affiliate definition and get it OKd by the board
> 2. decide what kinds of organizations we want to work with
> 3. each of us get an organization on board
> 4. get an affiliate directory up on the web site
> 
> I think the tasks can mostly be done in parallel although board buy in
> is something we should get sooner than later.

Yes.  Please.  Solid buy in on the affiliate stuff we're trying to *now* and
at least some clue that the other levels are generally in line with the
board and have a chance of getting approved.

> Here are my initial suggestions for the tasks:
> 
> 1. An affiliate is an organization with at least a tangental relation to
> an area of interest to LOPSA. There shall be at least one LOPSA member
> acting as a liaison between the affiliate and LOPSA. The affiliate does
> not need to have any LOPSA members in its membership.

Sounds good.

> 3. I've already got one :)

I've got at least one; a local SysAdmin group that I'm founding.  Possibly a
second: a local LUG that I'm on the board of.  Definitely need to have
something I can give them a link to that explains the benefits to the group
leaders before trying to get buy in for the LUG.  "Getting more people in
our area to know that we exist" is probably a sufficient benefit.

And both have iCal (vCal 2.0) and RSS feeds available for ease of scraping
info about upcoming events into a unified LOPSA schedule of some sort.  :)

> 4. I think the directory needs to be able to categorize the affiliates
> at least based on region, human language, interest (linux, mac, perl,
> etc.). It also needs to point at the group URL and the contact info for
> the group.

That's a good minimum.

Maybe also keep: when group was started, how many members (range needs to be
possible), typical meeting size, how often they meet, cost of membership (if
any), organization style/status (new, informal, formal), last update of the
information (or some other hint about currency of information, so that six
years from now you might have a clue that a particular group might just be
defunct) and some sort of general notes or comments for the information that
doesn't have a hope of fitting into properly organized information.

Occurs to me that Drupal/CivicSpace can do this without a whole lot of extra
work.  Each "group" is a node, taxonomies for a lot of it...  As long as the
liason can edit the node...  Probably smoother with some custom coding to
create a special node.
-- 
Eric Eisenhart <*@eric.eisenhart.name>
IRC: freiheit; often on #lopsa
AIM: falsch freiheit
http://eric.eisenhart.name/