Simon Phipps wrote: > Why do we need to make this abstract classification?
For navigation and organizational ease? As Jim pointed out, the "problem" with user groups today is that they are mixed in with all the other Projects on the Projects listing page. One reason for defining an abstract classification "User Group" is so that we could have a page that listed all (and just) the User Groups. We could just make a soup. Make everything a group, and hope that somehow visitors and community members can/will derive navigation and searching and ... out of thin air. I don't believe that it would work, but hey, I've been wrong before. If we are drawing lines around what we are doing today, we are doing user groups, consolidations, Projects as well as various forms of SIG/mailing lists. Forcing them all into a single "Group" umbrella seems counterproductive... Maybe some use-cases would help here: A user comes to the OS.o website. They wish to find out where <something> is happening. Telling them "we have 300 things, one of them might be what you are looking for - have fun searching, navigating, whatever" is less than helpful. An alternative is to say "we have User Groups (look over there), Development Communities (over here) and a bunch of Projects that are sponsored by the various Development Communities (thata way). In addition, we have a bunch of discussion groups that span across these boundaries (look here)". -John
