I'm working on a new layout for the Boston Drupal group and I wanted to solicit some input from the community before I do anything drastic. It seems that our group's 244 members are using this page for a bunch of different purposes and I wanted to compartmentalize these into a just a few useful pages and blocks. My purpose is to help members find what they are looking for faster, and make sure the most pertinent of topics do not get buried.
I looked over the last three months worth of posts and there are two distinct types of posts made on the Boston group. The local meetups and functions dominate the earlier posts, but recently there has been an explosion of job listings (this is generally good, I think). I think we're starting to run into the problem where content gets buried very quickly under our traditional "river of news" layout, and its especially difficult to see what the next local event really is. Granted, I was prompted to open up this discussion because my event got buried pretty quickly but I think as our group builds in participation that we'll see more of this problem.
I've given this some thought and figured its time to panel-ify the Boston group, much to the same tune as the Drupal Dojo. My plan is to make up separate pages based on the content types we already have, so there will be events, jobs, and discussions pages on the group menu, and then a home page that pulls these sorted views into their own panel area. I would like to feature discussion-type postings somewhere so that they are promoted to a place that drives participation and not just for reading or adding to your calendar. And on the page, I think its important to maintain some level of the river-of-news style postings that we know and love.
I would also like to introduce a more specific region tagging because I can see that folks out in central and western massachusetts are also using the Boston group and I want to help them create an identity within this group. I'm thinking of naming some regions like Boston proper, metro N, S, W, and central and western mass. I've already added these categories and slipped some tags onto some of the events you've created as seeds.
Those are my thoughts, but before I carve anything up, I'd like to ask for your input. I'll probably let this go for a few days and then make the changes. Of course, even after the changes this discussion will always be open. Thanks for your help!