Okay, I am not experienced at all in planning a web site from the
bottom up, but I have been involved with many seat-of-the-pants
projects.  I do have a few thoughts and -- lucky you! -- I'm gonna
share them.

I completely agree with most of what Nate said.  I know there is a lot
of excitement about what software/technology/­languages, etc. to use
and everyone is really enthusiastic about doing what they know best
/right now/.  But before we can start thinking about these
implementation details, we really need to know exactly what we're
gonna implement.  I think we all need to take a step back and hash out
a list of requirements, along with what we want to implement right
away and what we want to keep for future.  Let's come up with as
thorough and detailed a plan that we can, either assign or volunteer
for tasks, etc.  Then we can dive full force into how to create our
site and what technologies we want to use.

That said, I also think it is probably a good idea to slap up at least
a forum or message board or mailing list.  Right now all of our
communication is going through Meetup.com and from everything I've
heard, there is no way to get that back out.  There is already some
valuable stuff there and if we want it, we'll have to manually migrate
(read re-type) the data over to whatever it is we end up doing.  If we
slap up just one communication channel, we mitigate our risk of extra
effort later on and avoid having the multiple authentications.  I
don't think we should do anything more than that -- one channel of
communication where we completely own the data.  The rest of the needs
can be addressed by our wonderful, fabulous product.

So, there you have it.  Where's my cappuccino?