Offline Meet-up Events for Chow-Tastings. Now's the time to start-up a new forum

[sassille]

Wine Spectator’s forum offers an Offline Events Board, why not here?
The Wine Spectator manages a fairly complicated forum and they seem to have room on their board to post offline, non-commercial meet-up wine-tasting events. Why can’t we do this here? For example, if a group of ‘Hounds wanted to hook-up for a tasting at a new gelato place in Cucamonga, they could actually post it and not be sent to the puppy-farm to have their tails clipped.
Part of the chow experience is to share it with hounds who have similar tastes. Its part of the adventure, guys. Can we give this a try?

Cecilia
"life is a banquest and some poor fools are starving to death"
Auntie Mame

[IamJacksBrain]

That sounds like a great suggestion for the local boards.

[yayadave]

Have you seen this thread? It has a method off chowhound.
http://www.chowhound.com/topics/show/305797

It looks like you could look into:
http://www.meetup.com/

[The Dairy Queen]

I agree! I, too, am in favor of adding a Board that exists for the specific purpose of organizing Chow-tastings.

~TDQ

[yayadave]

It does seem that we have a lot of boards of marginal value. Maybe some of them could be (gasp!) eliminated to allow room for this type of "clearing house" board or even a board for a discussion of cookbooks.

[hatless]

Amen. I understand not wanting to clutter boards with logistical planning threads, but heaven forbid there be a board set aside for -- yes -- logistical planning threads. Why sign in to two places? Why force us to post our email addresses and myspace profile names or whatever when we want to organize chow tours, taco crawls, etc.?

Indeed, why not aim higher with this nifty new software framework and allow specially marked, region-specific "meetup" posts in each board, listed in a sidebar or calendar that can be turned on or off? All sorts of things are possible. After the event date (set in the event thread) the thread could automatically close to replies, and force the followup chow-centric event postmortems onto the chow part of the board where it belongs.

There are ways to do this that would keep the boards 100% chow-focused, keep information-sharing at a maximum, and still allow meetups to flourish. Nu?