Making groups more effective

I am a Drupal newbie who has been trying to find others who have similar interests to mine. Since I am looking for people with specific interests, I was looking through Working Groups.

Unfortunatly, it appears that

1. many Groups are dead (no postings for months or even years)
2. the structure of group pages is confusing at best

It may be that I am new and simply do not understand the sturcture of Drupal groups. I see the ability to create Discussions, Wikis, Proposals, Events, etc., but I don't see any effective way to find anything that has gone before in a Group. I am hoping there is a well structured overview of all that has, is and will be going on in the group and that I simply do not know how to get there.

Because I don't know what is where, I would like to describe what I believe would be an effective structure for a group (note, more a working group than a geographic group).

In my opinion, every group should have a home page that:

1. clearly defines the mission/focus of the group (including a statement of what is not in the focus of the group that one might otherwise think belongs to this group)
2. identifies the moderators for the group (in a block?) and provides and easy way to contact them (and shows the date of most recent contribution to the group so we can clarly see who is still participating)
3. provides a structure of topic areas within the group's area of interest (in a block?) (sort of an outline table of contents) - a place for people to collect/post information relative to specific interests so one doesn't have to spend lots of time going through lots of postings that have nothing to do with what one is looking for. Each topic area, should have its own page that has the same type of things as the group home page (with the narrower topic focus):
   • lists of topic-related Events, Discussions, etc.
   • a link to a topic-related wiki page
   • links to other pages and sites related to this topic (perhaps with tags for the type: tutorials, videos, products, tools, people, books, etc.) - especially so that one can reference other Drupal documentation and otehr pages so that effort is not duplicated.
4. a list (block?) of most popular FAQs (with links to the details of the FAQ as well as to a master page that shows all FAQs for the group/topic area). This could be a rated corner where one can ask questions and get answers, whereby either the usefulness rating or some users cleaning up a dialogue and posting as a clearly stated and answered FAQ could be tied in.
5. a list (block?) of upcoming events (with links to the details of the events (with signup capability) as well as to a graphical calendar that shows all events past and future that link to the event posting with all the threads related to that event)
6. a list of the titles of the most recent 5 or 6 Discussion postings (even though most such postings would be made from within a topic area within the group)
7. a list of links to other pages and sites related to this topic (perhaps with tags for the type: tutorials, videos, products, tools, people, books, etc.) - consolidated to pull from links posted relative to a sub-topics. This could also include blog postings that relate to the topic
8. a list (block?) of most recent Job Postings (with a hyperlink to the individual jobs as well as to a master list of all job postings)
9. a list of other members and how to contact them (and when they last contributed/accessed the group pages so we know who is active)
10. a list of what other members of the group are currently on line (with instant messaging capabilities to them (unless that have declared a do not disturb status)

All of the above should have 5 star ratings so one can have some idea of what might be useful.

Some other nice to have features would include:

1. the ability to easily organize online events (e.g. a show and tell using some share your screen technology) - this should be made very easy to use so that almost anyone can easily set up such a session - perhaps with a link to Skype or similar technology
2. a newsletter that would announce events, list Discussion titles since the last newsletter, list of external links posted since last newsletter, list of job postings since last Newsletter, etc. so that members who have not checked in recently might be animated to get involved again (group members would, of course be able to opt out of receiving newsletter). (This should not be seen as competition to the email subscription - those are not that effective because one gets bombarded by to many individual emails and there is no way to quickly get a sense of which vave value and which not.)

I have seen that a few groups have a "Home" tab at the top of the group that have taken some steps in this direction. But I am suggesting that this basic structure be created for every group as the group is created and that bringing the data from detail topics to the group home and so forth already be built in, etc.

It seems to me that everything I have mentioned here (other than entering the actual content) is very easy in Drupal and it is not bad to show that we eat our own dog food (an idiom for using one's own products).

The bottom line is that I envision Groups as a place where ideas are exchanged and a body of knowledge built about some subject or problem area. I am not finding this in most of the current Groups.

As I said in the beginning, the problem might be that I simply do not know how to use the groups and other Drupal resources yet. If that is the case, I hope someone will point me in the right direction.

If Groups is the place people are looking for this kind of collaboration (I am not thinking just about documentation, but about deep discussions of pros and cons about various topics within a focused subject space) and there are others interested in the kind of collaboration I have outlined, I would be willing to participate in creating such a structure for groups (assuming it does not already exist).

This has been somewhat of a long, rambling brain dump, but I hope the basic thought are understandable.

Thoughts, comments?