I was wondering who out of www.postcarbon.org and "The Oil Drum" is going to beat the other to the kudos of hosting BOTH of the meetup.com main functions.

First... there is the online meeting software, hosting the local group "virtually" so that peakniks can get together in their city in reality.
Second... there is no point hosting a group without an easy to access Master Directory! It's the MD for the peak oil world that I am mainly writing about.

Sydney Peak Oil started on meetup.com. At first it was people loggin in, and missing each other by a month or two. No one chatted. No conversations were responded to. It was as if they were logging in and finding out, "No one is home."

So, totally new to peak oil as I was at the time and totally desperate to get it out there, I logged in as Organizer for Sydney. I determined that I was going to welcome every peaknik that dropped by that group. You know what? It worked. 6 months later we were presenting peak oil to the NSW Upper House, and it made a brief appearance in the NSW Upper House parliament the next day.

Why? Was it because we had the strictest set of criteria for a member to join? Or was it because we had the most thorough mission statement? Did we sell 20 different kinds of peak oil books at our site? Did we have the latest, hottest expert on peak oil in our group?

Nah! We had none of that.

We are just concerned citizens that got together. Once we got together we were able to use one another's contacts and talents for peak oil awareness.

My concern is that meetup are charging and new groups are not forming as a result. If you look at the meetup world map, Australian groups are all wiped because no one could be bothered to log in and pay $9 per month for the "privilege" of using meetup.

So my criteria for a successful peak oil group website would be:-
1/ Really easy to use. I like phpbb.com shareware software.
2/ Free
3/ Easy to find your local group! I would allow a database to grow where you could search by Country, State, City, Group Name, Group Website, etc.
4/ No conditions! I would not "test" newcomers to peak oil before they could meet other peakniks. I would not demand that they were against Nuclear power, for example, before they could log in and meet their local peakniks. If they are even remotely sane, and remotely concerned about campaigning for peak oil awareness, I want them! I might tell them my concerns with nuclear power later on, over a cuppa after a meeting. But I would not prevent membership based on a more informed environmental checklist. That kind of system might just confirm some people in their beliefs that peak oil is all just environmental leftie tree hugging hippie crap, when we all know it is hard core science.
5/ Attractive. I hate email lists... and I love cool forums with smilies and graphics and the one discussion thread running all the way down the page, in order, and all the other whiz bang special effects. It makes it so much easier to get the vibe of what people are saying.

So, who is going to set up a system where peakniks can log in and leave their group information in a database? My poor old eclipse server is not cut out for that. Let's get this world movement MOVING! Can oil drum set up a worldwide database that tells new peakniks, definitively, if there is a group in their town?

Dave Lankshear
www.eclipsenow.org
Free peak oil posters for your local notice board.
www.sydneypeakoil.com
Raising Sydney's awareness of global oil depletion and the possible consequences