Title: Hi folks! I&#x27;m excited to show you gis.chat, a geospatial chat platform in both senses: a platform about geospatial topics and a geospatial platform itself, referencing the location of our communities.<p>The setup is fairly simple and reproducible: a plain Zulip instance and a homepage with geospatial search capabilities.<p>It seems almost trivial but it has some very nice features. I guess you should be familiar with Zulips stream&#x2F;topic model to follow along (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zulip.com&#x2F;help&#x2F;streams-and-topics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zulip.com&#x2F;help&#x2F;streams-and-topics</a>).<p>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).<p>- Every local stream can have the same topics, e.g. &quot;general&quot;, &quot;news&quot;, &quot;meetups&quot;, &quot;jobs&quot; etc. 
- With Zulip&#x27;s search you can either search for a particular topic, e.g. &quot;news&quot; in a local stream or instead in all streams and have some kind of news feed of the community with &quot;topic:news&quot;
- 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<p>There are many nice features in Zulip&#x27;s pipeline that would foster gis.chat:<p>- Further nesting of streams&#x2F;topics
- Semantic search<p>If for example Zulip would allow for saving coordinates (or better an entire geometry) in the Postgres DB, with the help of PostGIS, Zulip&#x27;s search could allow for bounding boxes (or custom geometries).<p>Let me know if you have any kind of other ideas or feedback!
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