Chris Dykstra of Warecorp is one of the founders of Gatheroo, a new community meeting and organising site. It’s free to the people and groups who use it and is supported by providing highly targeted advertising.
Gatheroo is due to open in the (northern) fall. If you are interested, you can register now.
Gatheroo is built on top of open source collaboration platform CivicSpace.
I recently met Chris in Minneapolis. He is evaluating GroupServer for some significant projects in the US.
How do you think GroupServer and Gatheroo complement & compete Dan?
Walter, you could say that GroupServer and CivicSpace are competitors but does that concept apply in the open source world? CivicSpace is way more mature than GroupServer but right now, GroupServer has better email list functionality. Also, even tho we have GoogleAds on one page, I don’t think we are going to pursue any ad-supported models. At the moment, it’s too important for us to promote ourselves. Sponsorship isn’t ad-supported, right?
I’m one of the people working on Gatheroo, and also one of the folks who met with Dan a couple of weeks ago (Hey, Dan!)
We are very impressed with the email list / forum capabilities of GroupServer. Chris and I happen to be running it for a non-business project (dfltech.org).
We haven’t made the final decision on which engine(s) to use for individual group mailing lists — the GS engine is pretty potent, but the sticky point is going to be integrating our extended permissions model from CivicSpace/Drupal into GroupServer. Fortunately, the integration isn’t my problem, I’ve passed it on to another colleague to deal with :->