The setup is fairly simple and reproducible: a plain Zulip instance and a homepage with geospatial search capabilities.
It seems almost trivial but it has some very nice features. I guess you should be familiar with Zulips stream/topic model to follow along (https://zulip.com/help/streams-and-topics).
The core idea is that there are city-specific streams (currently represented by a pin), but there could just as well be streams about points of interest, line geometries (e.g. a river) or polygons (e.g. national park).
- Every local stream can have the same topics, e.g. "general", "news", "meetups", "jobs" etc. - With Zulip's search you can either search for a particular topic, e.g. "news" in a local stream or instead in all streams and have some kind of news feed of the community with "topic:news" - Once more communities are added, specific filters could be added, e.g. country-wise or by drawing your own area of interest - Eventually, for the ones who like, users could associate themselves with a local community in their profile or add there main location so one could not only search for the local communities but instead also for individuals
There are many nice features in Zulip's pipeline that would foster gis.chat:
- Further nesting of streams/topics - Semantic search
If for example Zulip would allow for saving coordinates (or better an entire geometry) in the Postgres DB, with the help of PostGIS, Zulip's search could allow for bounding boxes (or custom geometries).
Let me know if you have any kind of other ideas or feedback!
