A technical fault surfaced today – number ‘I’ve-lost-count’ in the history of the Events Portal side of UKNetworker – and rather than spend another afternoon debugging something that was already on borrowed time, I made the decision to close the events portal down. Rather than a loss, I believe it will be a positive change for the fellowship.
For those who don’t know the history: the Events Portal was the original heart of this business, back at the very beginning when the service was called East Midlands Networker, and long before the Fellowship existed.
Finding, curating, and listing local business events was what we did. I spent an enormous amount of time over the years building and rebuilding it, including a number of months last year attempting to make recurring events and direct bookings work inside the platform. That last part didn’t come together, and if I’m honest, the portal has been running on sentiment as much as anything else since the relaunch.
It’s the end of a chapter for me personally. But it’s the right close.
Here’s what changes, and why it’s actually better.
Events were always most useful when a real person said “this is worth your time” – not when they appeared in a directory because someone added them. The Inner Room is a more natural home for that. If you find something worth attending, worth sharing, worth putting in front of this particular group of people, post it. That’s a truer version of an events feature than anything a portal could offer.
To make that easy, there will be a dedicated section within the Inner Room specifically for events – including details of the Monthly Members Meetup each month, which is where you’ll find that going forward.
And the time that was going into sourcing, formatting, and maintaining portal listings goes somewhere more useful now: directly into member care and stewardship. That’s a trade I’m very happy to make.
The Fellowship gets leaner and more deliberate as it matures!
