This is my first post about David Nolen’s class Little Computers. We’re thinking about the iPhone as a computing device and learning to write applications for it.

I am going to build an iPhone application for users of Meetup.com for my primary project in Little Computers. Meetup is a pretty cool company — if you’re unfamiliar, it’s worth reading the following and checking out their site.

Meetup is the world’s largest network of local groups. Meetup makes it easy for anyone to organize a local group or find one of the thousands already meeting up face-to-face. More than 2,000 groups get together in local communities each day, each one with the goal of improving themselves or their communities.

Meetup’s mission is to revitalize local community and help people around the world self-organize. Meetup believes that people can change their personal world, or the whole world, by organizing themselves into groups that are powerful enough to make a difference.

I considered many alternative apps to build — xkcd, Diplomacy, a super simple app for exchanging contact info, a very complex app for music sharing, and others — but settled on this one. It seems like something that could be truly useful to a lot of people, doable within the course of the semester, and challenging and interesting to make. The slide deck and sketches I made to present the idea to the class is below.

Thanks to Alex Kauffmann for for the brilliant name — it’s much better than *Unofficial Meetup*.