Town wide family listserve/activity calender suggestion?

April 15, 2013 8:14 AM

We currently have a number of different list serves, google groups, yahoo groups, and meetup groups in our town, all involving family activities and community events. The different groups cover different neighborhoods, and there is a lot of overlap. I am wondering if there is some kind of service or tool that could be an giant umbrella for all of our groups, with subgroups according to interest, age of kids, neighborhoods, schools etc.

I am wondering if some kind of tag based system exists that we could use, maybe age tags, neighborhood tags, school tags, activity tags.... this tag granularity could determines the hierarchy in which one receives posts, so that posts near me for activities which match my kids age would have higher importance than other posts.

It would be nice if it was free, or inexpensive, and easy to administer.

A calendar view would be great along with discussion board type viewing.

thoughts?

posted by alball to Society & Culture (3 answers total)

There's Nextdoor, though it does take some time and energy to get everyone off of the existing platforms and onto something else.
posted by evoque at 8:27 AM on April 15, 2013

Big Tent is a service you might want to look at- you would need to migrate the other groups to it, but they have a lot of tech support to help and it is free. You have the ability to have subgroups and tags- though posters need to tag their own posts, so tagging is a mixed bag. I am part of a Big Tent group that was originally on yahoo groups and the move has allowed for better threads, and an easier was to search and have subgroups. They helped migrate old posts from the original yahoo group.
posted by momochan at 8:36 AM on April 15, 2013

Solutions that require everyone to migrate to the new service remind of this XKCD comic...
posted by kindall at 8:39 AM on April 15, 2013