«
»

Guelph Tech Community Website

June 30th, 2010
[ Guelph Tech ]

I’ve been gently conspiring with Cory, of Guelph Coffee and Code fame, for a while now about a website for the Guelph technology community. The idea is straightforward, the various events and projects in Guelph should have their own web presence if they need it. It doesn’t, however, make sense for all those sites to replicate common features. We don’t need 10 event calendars, job boards, company indices, etc.

So the idea is for us to collaborate and build one presence or portal where we can work together and build the common spaces. Then the various sites like diyode and demoCampGuelph can focus on being all things democampy and diyodie.

So my first question is, do you feel we’re ready for this? I’ve always felt we’ll need this at some point, the question is are we at that point now.

Second, what related projects or codebases should we consider starting from? Ideally we can find something that we can eventually contribute back to. Ideas that come to mind are techstartup and startupindex. What others should be considered?

Third, do you want to help out?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 30th, 2010 at 1:55 pm and is filed under Guelph Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • http://www.pchenry.com PHenry

    We’re having a similar issue here with our three MS user groups in Ottawa. We’re juuuust in the process of setting it up. We did have a proof of concept site up for a month and bit but that stage is over now, and we’re just setting up the new “umbrella” site in the next week or so.

    We’re using DNN for our base and building out from there. DNN is already used by a number of user groups in Canada, easy to learn, is .NET if custom modules need to be created, skinning/theming is built in and an be bought, remote administration is a HUGE bonus, and user registration/sign-in/maintenance is a non-issue. Lots of upsides to using DNN if you can put up with the large size and SQL Server requirements.

    Good luck with your site!

  • http://jeffreysambells.com Jeffrey Sambells

    Sounds like a good idea to me. It would be nice to have a place online to network with other tech companies and individuals in and around Guelph.

  • http://www.jetpacksandrollerskates.com Blake Stevenson

    this is by far the best idea ever… have you guys met together about this yet? I really would love to get this going!

  • http://www.somaegroup.com John Rockefeller

    Thought I’d chime in here.

    First: Yes, I believe we are at that point now. There is a cross-pollination of attendees between the three meetups, so it would help to have people go to one site instead of 3, etc. Twitter accounts and Facebook “Like” pages can be centralized with widgets as well.

    Second: If you’re looking for the platform for the website I would suggest not building it from scratch as it will likely never be completed :) Don’t reinvent the wheel! somaICE may be a good fit unless you’re looking for something open source as it is SaaS.

    Third: soma already helps out by hosting open source projects (php, et al) on our web servers for Guelph Coffee and Code. If the groups were to come together I’m sure we could provide more FTP usernames & passwords, along with mysql DBs, etc. for projects that are being worked on.

    Looking forward to seeing where this goes.

    PS: Happy Canada Day :)

  • brydon

    Hey Blake. We haven’t formally met about this yet although it’s certainly come up a lot in gatherings. Judging by the response here, it’s worth setting something up soon for this and getting it rolling.