Hello, hello

[zvi]

I must confess, I've never run one of these communities before, so I don't have a very clear vision for it. I do know that I'd like to be a little more out and about locally, so I figured this was one way to start.

The only current rules are "Be excellent to one another" and "Keep it local." If somebody who has more experienced with a geographic based comm wants to offer some pointers, I'd love to hear them.

Suggested topics for discussion: food; shopping; local clubs of any and every sort (for instance, I created the literally_lesbians_feed, which is a feed for a lesbian bookclub that meets monthly in DC, announcing the feed or announcing the meetings and books is on topic); local politics (which, okay, in DC that can have some pretty far-reaching implications, so just use your common sense); breaking news; freecycling; cultural events, or even just saying, "Hey, I wanna go to the Air and Space museum on X date, anyone want to come with?"

P.S. Anybody have any idea how we should arrange our tags?

Comments

[white_aster]

I'm a fan of categorized tags (tags prefixed with a specific word so they group together in the tag list). It makes it easier to find things if you don't have to scan the whole list looking for a specific location, topic, etc: all the locations, all the topics, etc. are all grouped.

How about these?

"where:"
To be used with anything else to denote location. Like: "where: va" and "where: dc"

"event" or "event:"
For one-time or yearly events. If you have to put it on your calendar, it's an event. Might have to be broken out into areas like "event: music" "event: shopping".

"info:"
For things specific to particular areas: "info: va", "info: dc", "info: md", etc. These would be for persistent things, rather than one-time events (which would obviously use the event tags).

"discuss:"
For things not relating to actual concrete events or places. Like, "discuss: politics" or "discuss: music".

"question"
For folks who are asking for information, to be paired with other tags about what they're asking about.


So from that we'd get:
"What do you think about dc statehood?", tagged "discuss: politics, where: dc"

"Who do you think's the best DC-local band, and when's their next show?" tagged "discuss: music, where: dc, event: music, question")

"What's the best way to get to the Cherry Blossom Festival?", tagged "event:festival(?), question, where: dc"

How's that for a start? :D

[celtic_maenad]

that's an amazing start! I agree, categorized tags are the way to go, as they're especially useful to folks coming in later.

I have a hesitation about the tag "event", but it's not concrete enough to have words yet. Mostly I'm thinking that concert-type one-time-only events might want their own tag from recurring annual Cherry Blossom Festival events. But I don't have a solution.

[It's a particular hang-up of mine: I want to offer a suggestion for a solution if I bring up a problem.]

[white_aster]

That's totally true, and I thought the same thing, actually. I just wasn't sure it was going to bug anyone else but me. ;P

We could have a separate tag for recurring events: "annual events", and even break IT down into "annual events: music" etc. if we wanted. We might be splitting hairs at that point, though...not sure how many annual events we'd HAVE to worry about categorizing, really.

If we want, we could also just have a special compound events classification tag for it: "events: annual" or something, and then pair it with "events: music/cooking/etc"... I'm not sure which of those is better/less confusing? Anyone else have any ideas?