Some meetupMeetup 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./meetup.com news:

• I have been training @chanthaboune and Petya on processing meetup applications. Am hoping that in another couple of weeks we’ll be ready to roll that out to start training more people to help process them (I want to get Josepha and Petya done first so they can then train the next round of folks).
• It was too late to bump up the number of meetupsMeetup 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. for the quarter so we’ll be at 120 through the end of March. Right now we are using 113, so we’ll need more room based on the queue. Which is probably not a huge deal because….
• There are a number of groups that were created in the past year that never really went anywhere. In some cases it might just need a new organizer, while in others it turns out there’s just not enough demand in the area. We’ll be contacting groups that have been inactive for a few months to see what’s up and possibly retire the group if no one wants to step up to organize events.
• Some recent roll-ins include New York, Des Moines, Marietta (Atlanta area), and Bucharest.
• Over the next two weeks we are hoping to have tho orientation hangouts with all the people who’ve been in the queue (they should all have been contacted at this point and it’s just a matter of scheduling/playing email tag).
• Meetup.com has removed (for any new groups moving forward) the setting that allows any member to announce events. This is frustrating because letting anyone organize events is kind of the cornerstone of our program, and this puts the group organizers in the position of having to approve suggested events (members can still suggest events), which creates a sense that the approving organizer is somehow responsible for the event, which isn’t the case. We’ll have to create some new documentation to reflect this change, and will likely want to send an email to all group members about organizing events when we send out survey results.
• We’ve started sending out the annual survey links to groups on the chapter account. Since we have to customize the links by hand and meetup.com restricts how many messages you can send per day (this really just is not set up well for a chapter program), it might take a little bit to get them all out. We’ll let them run for two weeks then collate and post results (and compare to last year).
• A lot of meetup groups have outdated organizer rolls due to someone moving, people moving on from organizing, etc. We’ll ask remaining organizers to a) identify a main point of contact for each group, and b) clean up the organizer list so that only current org are listed so that members have accurate information about who to contact.
• Another year, another attempt at monthly communications to the groups to help promote contributor drives and such. The main question on this is should the communication be an email to the organizers (who might not pass on the info and/or who would only pass on to attendees (usually less than 5% of membership list), an email to the members (is a once-a-month email from WordPress too much?), a monthly post on the group’s discussion board, or something else?

All of these things to say, oh, comunity hub, how anxiously we await your birth. 🙂

#meetups-2, #updates