Let's just go crazy with this project. It really can't hurt.
This is the vision:
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That in your city, you should be able to get a Yelp-like experience for your local community groups. You shouldn't be expected to spend hours years trolling the Internet to find out that in your own neighborhood, there is a cool group of old people who teach people how to graft scions onto fruit trees, and they really want interested young people to show up. Or that if you go hang out in one neighborhood, that you can have the inventor of an important telescope show you sun spots. (Both true stories.)
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Beginning community organizers make lists of groups. Groups will always be forming. People will always be making contact lists for whatever topic they are organizing in. The problem is, those lists become squandered. Once you are established, you forget that there are other people behind you who are trying to find their way. A year or two later, that list you made is totally out of date.
We should be using the power of the web, especially the power of the wiki, to make a community directory, and we should focus on making it easy to use, up-to-date, and very localized. We should channel that drive to make lists towards something useful rather than proprietary. It's when we stop doing these old habits of working and make them more efficient and less redundant that we get to focus more on actually solving problems. Personally, I think that community organizers who would be explaining community groups like a hyper local blogger might - maybe that would be better for everyone. Many of them do this already, on their own dime, on hand-crafted web pages. People like to learn new technologies, but cobbling together 'web skills' alone seems like a waste of energy when people could be working together - and make more rapid strides in making better data as well as more deeply improving their web skills, with less effort.
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We shouldn't over-reach. This is local information we are focusing on. The groups live in the city & serve city residents. We're not tackling all of the world's problems. We're only dealing with groups - not events or projects. Let's make a great community group directory that is a web service, and serve one city, neighborhood, or topic well.
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Support community organizers. Help community organizers share. Help new community organizers find a productive niche. Help people working for a large goal - like a better food system, or a socially just society - to address a network of issues. Share what should be known, give small organizations a boost and more visibility. Help people doing similar projects find each other.
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Machine-readable. Integrating with emerging tools that support civic work, we can make some strides in giving all of these tools access to high-quality public community groups data.
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Participatory development. I'm willing to organize a web service to provide stability for this project if everyone else is willing to develop this project with the same values that many of the community groups we list - inclusive, providing opportunities for professional development in technology.
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Humble about our technology. Quality data, positive user experience & community ownership & governance of the technology are what matters here. Technology gets outdated, we should be humble about using new technology shells.
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Serving people who care & need this information. This tool is for people who need a little help finding new communities to connect with. It isn't that we are all totally shy, busy, overworked...many of us might like to know that there is a group of moms who are trying to get together every tuesday and make food for the rest of the week. Do you really have to be a parent to help out? Do you really have to start a non-profit just to have a mom-group? You can organize however you like - using Facebook, Twitter, Email, or going door to door & bugging your neighbors. The fact is, life in America is really hard, and an awful lot of us are not able to really help in efforts to make everyone's lives better because we just don't have enough connections to simple and practical opportunities. I believe that better information can fix this. If you want to find existing groups of runners, on that night you are feeling totally fat, you should be able to do a search, find local running groups, not have to read 50 web pages and piece it together. By the time you are done, you may feel hopeless and then decide against making a better choice. It seems unnecessary.
The fact is, most of us don't know our neighbors. Maybe some of our neighbors are crazy. Maybe some of them are actually cute people we should marry. Maybe you need to be friends with an old lady a few blocks away. We shouldn't be required to act like advertising executives just to start a community garden. We need a safe & simple place to be listed, and it shouldn't be cluttered with dumb advertising. It's not our fault that the commercial development removed corner stores. Some of us still don't go to farmer's markets. We need better options. Meetup is a really great example too - you can really find all kinds of things. But we also need someone who is willing to not be a technology serving groups, and instead to be a promoter of all the groups. Infrastructure. Google sort of failed us. The things we want to do use generic words, we have no klout, we just want to see if there is a potluck near our house. How are we supposed to know that we are supposed to download 30 different apps and use 30 different civic web applications. Social media follows community boundaries. Someone needs to arbitrate.
There really are no rules here - so really, let's just figure out what we have to do, as a society, to be able to find our neighborhood organizations more easily. We can be creative in how we work.
Funding
These are the funding ideas. Let's make this happen.
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Kickstarter. I think it would be really beneficial to have demonstrated community support. If no one wants the tool, then it is not worth our energy to build it, right?
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Grants to support community involvement. Once people want it though, at the very least we need coordinators and point people to keep it going - and they need to be paid for their time. I've organized lots of hackathons (and iconathons) - I think that the value there is in networking, basically people volunteer when they get something for their time. If people aren't getting value, well, things don't work anyway, so let's not do that.
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Community, government & foundation sustaining support. This effort will take time & coordination. There are all kinds of innovative things we can do if we build a quality community group database. I'm not a fan of the wikipedia/public radio fund drive model... but for making new community group infrastructure, it is an option. The Yellow & White pages are also a model. Some of CityGroups is not very sexy. Showing a list of disease support groups is helpful. It's not technologically fancy.