Have you ever planned a mass gathering? If so, pls hope me.

December 1, 2006 7:45 AM

Hiya, I need help. I want to plan a reunion of a large number of disparate people next spring and I need advice and maybe a tutorial on this wiki thing I keep hearing about.

So these are people of all ages, many of them with minimal internet skills, who live all over the place. I don't even know how to find many of them. (We all worked together in the early 90s in a somewhat remarkable place and everyone has since moved on.) I was thinking a website where people could post date suggestions and add contact info for the people they are still in touch with might be the way to go. Do I need a wiki? If so, what do you suggest? It would have to be extremely easy to set up (for me) and even easier to use (for them.) I don't need bells and whistles, just ease of use.
Or, have you got a better suggestion? I suspect an attempt at sending group emails will just get out of control and leave some people off.
Have you ever planned a sprawling gathering like this?

posted by CunningLinguist to computers & internet (7 comments total)

A very quick and dirty method would be to set up a free blog on blogspot or the like and allow open comments to your posts, and you could add some as authors. This wouldn't be a viable method, however, if you were going to post private contact information.

You could also set up a yahoo group in a few minutes if you have all the email addresses you need.
posted by Burhanistan at 7:51 AM on December 1, 2006

Just do evite. You can suggest 5 dates/times and have people respond with their preferences, and you can request that everyone invite people that you've missed or don't have contact info for. You can send updates whenever you want to, change the current state of the invitation, etc. And many people are comfortable using evite.
posted by Amizu at 8:03 AM on December 1, 2006

If you want to do the Wiki thing, and will be posting private info, I'd recommend PBWiki. It's free, private Wikis do not have any visible pages but a password (use a shared piece of info and you might not even have to email it out directly). The UI is pretty simple.

Make sure, however, that they understand how to hold a discussion on a Wiki (add a line and sign, rather than blank the whole page with your opinion).

Hope it all works out!
posted by Xoder at 8:13 AM on December 1, 2006

Honestly - wiki would not be my choice for organizing people with minimal internet skills. It's too easy for them to screw up quite a lot and too different in terms of formatting from anything they've seen before.

My suggestion would probably be a Yahoo Group. People can interact with it via email alone, but it also offers options for polls and easy to use (but not very powerful) databases, as well as photos and such.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:05 AM on December 1, 2006

I second Evite and Yahoo Groups. Try setting up a draft invitation at Evite, and explore all their features - you can have people suggest dates, vote on topics, etc. Then try a draft over at Yahoo so you can figure out which one works better for you.
posted by Sprout the Vulgarian at 9:10 AM on December 1, 2006

Thirding Evite and Yahoo! Groups.

I don't know what sort of reunion event you're thinking of, or what stage you're at, but I recommend checking out Reunion Solutions (there's a separate planner, too). It covers more than just family gatherings, so there should be plenty of helpful information for you on how to organize things.
posted by metabrilliant at 2:16 PM on December 1, 2006

I'm not sure how closely it matches your specific needs, but some friends have used TripHub and found it pretty good for something similar.

Failing that, I'd n^th Evite and Yahoo Groups.
posted by insipidia at 2:31 PM on December 1, 2006