• Agendas of past and future meetings, with links to details of Talks.
• Details of Talks:
  
  • meeting(s) at which it was given;
  • presenter (with link to his/her details (see below) if available, including other talks given or proposed);
  • abstract;
  • further details as HTML;
  • downloads (e.g. PowerPoint file, example code);
  • category / keywords (for searching).
  Currently, you can email any details relating to talks to jlambe@rocketmail.com and they will be added to this site.
• Newsgroups (probably web-based). Including one for suggestions relating to this site. Ideally this could also email new messages to users (users could select channels to receive message for or messages to receive replies to).
• Email lists.
• Product (tools, components, etc.) reviews and other technical articles by members.
• Polls of members - about technologies used, what people would like to see in future talks, etc.
• Members - details of anyone who is willing to be contactable by other members. This could be password-protected to prevent spam by non-members.
  It could include links to members personal and/or business home pages and links to all talks given by the member.
• A section for people to add abstracts of talks which they volounteer to present at future meetings. Members could comment on whether they would find them useful and meeting organisers could consult this when planning a meeting.
• Any free software written by members.

My idea is to have all content stored in a database and served by Java servlet(s) which also provide an integrated search facility for the whole site (when I get around to writing it). This would enable us to change the style/layout of all pages together and will make it easier to enable members to update content (e.g. relating to their own talks) themselves.

We can host email on the site (with web or POP3 access), but due to space limitations, I would prefer to just use email forwarding. We could all have addresses with this domain and one address which always redirects to whoever is organising the next meeting.

I think our hosting company, DigitalSpace, don't allow chat servers, but I could modify my own one so that the first user to connect automatically hosts the system and the web site provides the address of this user (users would have to configure their browsers to allow the applet to make connections to machines other than the web server).

We could possibly promote the site by joining a banner-exchange program.

If you have any comments or suggestions please submit them in the discussion section.