I'm afraid strongly disagree with Meetup becoming a de facto requirement for meetups. Upon many hearty recommendations from this very list that Meetup.com is a great source of new members, we signed up. Unfortunately, we only had one or two additional members, and we have since closed our Meetup.com account as almost all members (except those that found us via Meetup) agreed it was not worth the money. I think it might depend on geographical location as to whether Meetup.com helps. Also, as Hannes mentioned earlier, it's a subscription service that we have no control over, closed source, blah blah. We had much more success with communicating directly with our local university campus and businesses in the area :)
At PHP Hampshire we use Joind.in purely to rate the talks we have, but I am understanding what others are feeling about it being geared towards conferences, and I agree, so not sure where to go on that. Joind.in is very open though, and has APIs and whatnot, so it's worth keeping in mind. There are a lot of very good ideas flying around here - we need to channel these into one place so we can focus on the biggest impact first. Any ideas? On 5 December 2013 20:24, Sandy Smith <sa...@sfsmith.com> wrote: > > On Dec 5, 2013, at 3:19 PM, Andreas Heigl <andr...@heigl.org> wrote: > > > I would not like to see Meetup.com become a 'de facto' requirement for > > usergroups as there are othger ways of setting up their informations. > > Although it might be ONE way of doing things. > > > > > Unfortunately Meetup is becoming a de facto requirement, just because it’s > a ripe source of new members. This is unfortunate as these members are less > committed (in my experience) and the fees aren’t cheap. However, it brought > the single biggest boost to DCPHP membership of anything I’ve done. > > I’d definitely agree it should be one among many, but it does seem to have > become the primary way people find events. > > -- > Sandy Smith - http://musketeers.me/ > php[architect] magazine: http://phparch.com/ > > @SandyS1 > > > > > >
