A way for OpenHacks to display their status

[qrush]

The main problem I have with the homepage of OpenHack is that it's difficult to tell which meetups are active, in progress, etc. I'm pretty sure we can put this metadata in the YAML frontmatter of each page in Jekyll...so for example:

---
layout: default
title: OpenHack - Buffalo
status: active

---

And then we can display that on the home page. I need to double check my Jekyll wizardry, but even a rake task to do this would work.

What statuses would there be? I'm thinking:

• Preparing (Looking to organize, no dates set yet)
• Active (Meetups actively scheduled)
• Inactive (Meetups held in the past, no future meetups scheduled currently)

[anoldguy]

If we're going to put status in there, there's no reason you couldn't have meta-data about # of attendees, open-source commits, Mt.Dews/Beers consumed, etc... Yes, it's crude, but if we're going to treat the YAML as a flat-file DB (which I'm ok with), then let's put some good stuff in there, too. 👍

[qrush]

I'm 👎 on bloating the metadata or making it more cumbersome to maintain. The status of a group is due to change infrequently.

[ilikepi]

I think status would be good in theory. The main issue would be groups that were previously Active, but then became Inactive through neglect, since the members of those groups might neglect to update their own status. There would have to be some occasional house cleaning by members of other groups (which is fine of course).

With respect to adding other metadata, it would seem better to wait until there was a reason to show that metadata outside of the city page itself before adding it. We add attendee count to Providence's page already after each meetup. I don't think we'd see an immediate benefit from adding it to the page metadata as well unless it was to appear elsewhere on the site.

[qrush]

Good point. Who maintains the unmaintainable? 😖

What if we just did Preparing/Active to start?

[anoldguy]

I can live with that. I'm just pretty pumped about OpenHack, and was looking at ways to spice it up. I have no problem sticking with basics, tho. 🤘

[afeld]

I run a group called Hacker Hours, and have a little bit of JS that pulls in the next upcoming Meetup here.

Might be a useful way to automate this process, potentially showing if there's an upcoming Meetup, or if there's been one recently or not.