San Diego Space Society

The San Diego Space Society believes in doing impressive things on the cheap, and our website is no exception. Here are some of the technologies we’ve used to encourage activity and participation without all the cost and hassle:

WordPress
The WordPress platform is often associated with blogs, but it also works well for general-purpose site administration. Each member of the website working group can add or edit content on the site through a simple online administrative interface, and templates are applied to the results so they look great. We currently host the site for free on WordPress.com, with domain services (for sandiegospace.org and sdspace.org) provided for a small yearly fee.

Google Apps
WordPress.com doesn’t provide email services, so we use a customized version of GMail to manage mail at sandiegospace.org addresses. A Google spreadsheet (automatically shared among board members) is also used to maintain the membership list (see below.)

Google Groups
Lively discussion is the heart of any community group, so we use a set of Google Groups mailing lists to keep in touch, share ideas, and plan. The main group is open to all interested parties, and there are smaller private groups for planning and project management.

Eventful
Our calendar of events is powered by Eventful, which provides a sidebar calendar and online event promotion tools. Any member or interested party can join the group calendar and add events of interest.

Wufoo
The membership form is powered by Wufoo, a service that makes it dead simple to collect information and send it to the people who need to know. New memberships are sent to the board, which updates a shared Google spreadsheet (see above).

Ma.gnolia
Our space news sidebar is an RSS feed of a Ma.gnolia social bookmarking group. Moderators can post new space items to the group, plus rank and categorize them.

Flickr
Public photos are shared in the San Diego Space Society group on Flickr. People can watch photo slideshows, comment on the photos, share them, and blog about them.
We’re bringing more tools online as we get set up. If you have suggestions for other tools we might use, please leave a comment below.