For those of you who use the Meetup app to schedule events, we're working on importing events from Meetup. This is working fairly well, and we just imported the first batch. Basically this is based on Meetup's rules for what is an "active" Meetup event, which means that the meetup needs to have members and at least 3 people signed up to go to the event.

Tomorrow is the day of The Big Share in Wisconsin. You get an opportunity for one day to make investments in the Wisconsin community by donating to nonprofits and other worthy organizations in the state. It's easy - go to the Big Share Website and make your contributions on-line. Many of the organizations have matching shares, so for many of them donating tomorrow will multiply your charitable giving.

Lots of site improvements are going on at Wis.community for the new year. The site now has a membership option, where you can voluntarily make a contribution to help us grow.  There are memberships starting at $10 for an individual - currently the only perk on the site is that members of any type will have most of the ads on the site disappear when they are logged in. More perks are coming, including some nice additions for members who are nonprofits or businesses.

We are now set up so that you can contribute to the growth and development of Wis.community. You can purchase a membership in the site on-line, and pay with Paypal, check, or with a credit card. Money from memberships will be used to help defray the cost of the site - and we're also working on some new benefits that you will get with a membership.

Hi -

If you get a chance, it would be great if you could take just a minute or two to fill out our latest questionnaire. These really help us to figure out what should be worked on, and what your interests are. Fill it out here

The site is slowly becoming more fleshed out, with additional functionality. Some of the exciting things happening:

Short tutorial on how to create an account on Wis.community

I'm talking to the good folks at Groundsource at the moment - I'm interested in the possiblity of gathering info from folks in the community by text message, and this is an intriguing platform for that. There's an interesting article at Nieman Lab about the use of the platform in journalism.

Let us know if this sounds intriguing to you.

We are now importing some events in from Facebook -- they will show up in Black on the calendar, as do all the events that are imported in from other calendars on the Internet.  The Facebook events all have links that go to the actual Facebook event - but we pull them all here into one place for you.