Hi everyone! 👋 I’m one of co-organizers of Tokyo WordPress Meetup Meetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook..
I’ve run into what looks like a contradiction across three handbook pages about who can organize a Meetup event, and I’d like to ask for clarification and raise it for discussion.
First, to be clear about where I stand: I think the “any member can organize an event” setting in Group Tools should be on. I’m not arguing against it.
Three pages where describes “who organize meetup”
- Five Good Faith Rules, rule 4: Meetup groups allow events to be organized by any reliable/trusted member of the community.
- Any Member Can Organize an Event (handbook page, published Sept 2023): any member of the group may organize events, without gatekeepers.
- Existing Meetup Group Script (2015): “trusted” mostly means nice people who are active in the community, “reliable” means they show up when they say they will.
This split is recent — though I may be reading the history wrong
In the December 2016 version of the old meetups Meetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook. page, the Five Good Faith Rules and the “any member can organize” paragraph sat on the same page, and that paragraph said plainly that it was about a Group Tools setting.
My guess is that when this content was split into separate handbook pages in 2023, the text carried over but the surrounding context didn’t, and the new page title ended up reading as a statement of principle rather than a request about a checkbox. But that’s just my reading from the outside — if anyone was involved in that restructure and it was a deliberate change rather than a side effect, I’d genuinely like to know. It would change what I’m asking for below.
Why this became concrete for me
Someone who had never attended any of our meetups asked to organize one. I asked them to come along to an existing meetup first, and offered a video call to talk it through.
I don’t think that was gatekeeping. But “Any Member Can Organize an Event” is a page title that travels well on its own, and set against it, what I did is hard to explain. When a member asked me “anyone can organize an event, right? Or not?”, I couldn’t give a proper answer.
So I asked @nukaga, and she checked with the Community Team. The answer: any community member can run an event without being a co-organizer, but should coordinate with the co-organizers, who are expected to confirm they’re trustworthy and following the Five Good Faith Rules.
That reconciles all three pages, and it matches how I think most of us already work. But it reached me through private DMs. None of it is written down.
What I’m asking
- Is that interpretation correct?
- If so, I’d suggest retiring the “Any Member Can Organize an Event” page and putting its content back where it belongs: the Group Tools setting into the group management docs, and the operational expectation alongside the Five Good Faith Rules. The rules text itself should stay exactly as it is — it has been stable for a decade and that’s worth protecting. The page mostly restates things that live elsewhere, which is what made them look contradictory in the first place.
- Can this be logged as a known inconsistency in the handbooks audit?
One more thing, honestly: I hadn’t been following @adityakane‘s handbook restructure work, and I should have found it before writing this. Sorry. 🙏 If the working group still has room, I’d like to join and take the Meetup Organizer Handbook audit.
