Two weeks ago I ran a post about Tiny House Meets in your area. I received lots of great responses and I wanted to update you on my plans to help in this area on the Tiny House Blog. Following are some changes I plan to make to the blog in the near future.
- Events Calendar: I will create a page to post events such as workshops, meetings, etc. I need your help in letting me know what is going on in your area.
- Ads Page: Featuring Craigslist ads, Ebay ads, etc. Some readers don’t like the daily posts to be this type of ad so I will try to keep this page current, so please keep them coming. I know I like to see what is available out there.
- Tiny House Forum: The Tiny House Forum will be coming under the wings of the Tiny House Blog and will be tied in more directly so you can converse on ideas in a forum format.
- Location of Your Tiny Homes: I want to create a map of some type (this is still in the noodling stage) showing where tiny homes are located and people who are willing to show them via an open house, or group meeting.
These are some ideas to start with, the Tiny House Blog is an ever evolving blog but the goal is to keep you updated as best I can in what is going on in the Tiny House World. Please continue with your suggestions and help me make this a better place.
A splendidly bad-ass idea….
We need more of this….
-Deek
Any MA/NH MOBILE tiny housers out there? I’d like to get something together at some point in MA- and I might have a place or two to do it…
You could build a google map similar to what I made for my chicago jazz meetup group:
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&msid=106989935995416863067.0004803b4280e56e19474&ct=docsearch&cd=2&cad=docsearch,cid:12101274520999472735
Wow, that is really neat. I’ll have to do some research, is it difficult?
I think I just setup a google account and created a “my map” from the Google map page. The push pins I used to designate locations are a standard icon within google maps under edit mode. The pictures are url’s linked to member pictures on meetup, also put in under edit mode.
Kent, thanks for all of your hard working in bringing this information to us! This site is my number one, I have to read site everyday…
But… how exactly are they going to effectively encourage/make it easy for people to form groups or even meetup?
The politics around tinyhouses will never change unless people work together, and at least getting into communication with each other is a definite prerequisite for this. Period. Fact.
It might not necessarily take much, just a little note on the front page saying “Don’t forget to search yahoo groups for “tiny house club”s in your area” (whatever software platform used should have the feature to let the admin or whoever email members directly). Just a “nudge”. Meet and greets or whatever, could also be organized through these groups.
Given the lack of organizing we have right now, there is clearly a need for *something* to make it easier for people.
The problem with a calendar, or anything else that requires people to check it to see if there is a meeting in their area, is that very few people are likely to end up checking it. Anyone who might go to a meeting in their area if they knew about it, will not see it on the calendar. Why? Because, suppose a meeting happens every 6 months in their area, and there is a week of notice ahead of time. They would have to check the calendar 26 times, on average, to find out about 1 meeting. Who, who has a day job or at least a life, would check it 25 times, week after week for 6 months, each time there being no news whatsoever? No, they will forget or give up after the first couple times checking the calendar. This simple dynamic alone dooms it to failure as a means to distribute information to people about meetings in their area.
The information needs to be either Pushed out, (they give their email address asking to be notified of meetings in their area, which e.g. the yahoo group type thing could provide by the admin emailing them when meetings are planned, except that nobody that has a yahoo account just to join a group ever checks their yahoo email account), or the info on the page (e.g. a calendar) has to be very interesting to them, every time, to keep them checking, which is very hard to arrange.
An applet (or could be done in perl on the server side) on a blog that checked someone’s ip address to determine their location, then told them if there was a meeting in their area, might also work, I guess.
“Hey, judging by your IP address, you seem to be in Sacramento, California. On the calendar, there’s a meetup scheduled in you area for September 5th, 7pm at the Royal oak on 324 Woomple street. Be there!”
Good suggestions Parrot whisperer. I am open to these ideas but not always sure how to implement them. I thought I would start with the calendar to at least have something out there. Having something interactive seems more likely to work, but I would need some guidance in knowing how to make implement them.
I’m from the Healdsburg area over on 101, not sure I can make it over to Sac but will try. Some more info on the meet up would be appreciated.
Where can I get more information on the Sacramento meeting, I would like to share it here on the Tiny House Blog and I am not able to contact you through your email for some reason.
Lol, Kent, I just meant that as an example of what you might see on the page of the blog if you have the right perl script running on your server (and a way for people to input the meeting dates). When someone checks the web page, the script would check someone’s address, look in the database to see if there were any meetings coming up in their area, and then insert that text announcement into the corner of the web page before it is sent to them to read.
I tried to learn perl once, enough to know this would be trivial for someone who knows perl, I only wish I actually did any substantial learning there, and I would write you up something myself.
I might suggest, after you have decided aproximately what you want, that you might try a rent-a-coder site. The hourly wages are usually pretty reasonable. You could consult with someone who has experience with perl and the google map stuff, and they should be able to whip up something that works without too much trouble.