[Basfa] BASFA Meetup page
This email is to follow up the business I brought up at the March 4 meeting. My apologies for not sending this sooner. Within the last several weeks, it occurred to me that my Meetup.com account is no longer personal to me. Bay Area Ghost Hunters, now falls under the corporate umbrella of the recently filed West Coast Paranormal Events, Inc., so it has become rather awkward for me to allow the BASFA group to piggyback at WCPE's expense. For those who want to refer to the page, it can be found at: https://www.meetup.com/Bay-Area-Science-Fiction-Association/ For those who aren't familiar with Meetup, organizers pay for their spaces on the website and can have up to three groups on their accounts. Their plans have changed over the years, but at present BAGH is paying $89.94 every six months for its presence there. Explaining to my board why I'm giving BASFA space is something I cannot justify, especially if they might find another use for it. So, I can immediately think of three options on how BASFA wants to deal with it: 1. WCPE and BASFA can split the cost. 2. I can turn the organizer (admin) privileges over to an officer and BASFA can take complete ownership over its page. 3. Remove the group from Meetup altogether. It is fairly common on Meetup for an organizer to step down from a group without nominating a replacement. When they do this, an offer goes out to the all of the group's on-line members to take it over. If I do that, there's no promise who would take it over and it would likely lose its connection to BASFA. I also wouldn't want to take the chance that an outsider would continue to use BASFA's name. That would create two BASFA groups to confuse people. (I really don't want to go through the time-consuming hassle of cleaning off all the BASFA details before I let it go.) Considering BASFA's Meetup page has attracted nearly 600 members and bring fresh faces to its meetings, it might be worth holding onto. If BASFA opts to take complete ownership over its Meetup page, it would become easier to collect money through the rsvp process because it could go directly to a BASFA account. Meetup has a couple of other "organizer subscription" options, but I believe BASFA already has the one that suits it best. (I don't think Meetup Pro is worth it.) However, if you want to consider the other price plans, you can find them at: https://help.meetup.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001620472-Organizer-subscription-pricing-and-plans BASFA might choose another alternative once the group has thought it over. For instance, if BASFA takes ownership, it could hand admin responsibility over to Ken Patterson and split the cost with Legion of Rassilon, giving LOR a presence on Meetup. (Or perhaps, we can split it three ways.) I ask the officers and group to consider how they want to handle this. I'll be at the April 8 meeting to find out what your decision is. Adrienne Foster "BASFA Meetup Committee" ___ Basfa mailing list Basfa@lists.basfa.org http://lists.basfa.org/listinfo.cgi/basfa-basfa.org
Re: [Basfa] BASFA Meetup page
Quoting Adrienne Foster (ajfos...@pacbell.net): > So, I can immediately think of three options on how BASFA wants to > deal with it: > > 1. WCPE and BASFA can split the cost. > 2. I can turn the organizer (admin) privileges over to an officer > and BASFA can take complete ownership over its page. > 3. Remove the group from Meetup altogether. As someone who's seen this very same dynamic play out repeatedly with multiple Bay Area technical groups for which someone created a Mettup presence and then the organiser fees became an issue, I would strongly urge option #3, for exactly the reasons I outlined in http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/meetup.html . See in particular the passage about Silicon Valley Linux User Group's experience. Quoting: Meetup Users Have the AOL Nature What I mean by that admittedly unflattering comparison is that Meetup, Inc. has successfully created a self-contained walled-garden ghetto adjoining the Internet (just like AOL), whose denizens tend strongly to ignore everything outside it (just as with AOL). In 2012, a core member of Silicon Valley Linux User Group volunteered to attract new members for SVLUG via a Meetup presence, which indeed seemed a good idea. He was careful to annotate the Meetup.com page as saying that SVLUG is an independent group with its own off-Meetup Web site and mailing lists. A year later, he stopped paying Meetup, Inc. fees, and thus the page ceased being updated. As one of the core SVLUG leaders, I observed a remarkable thing: The large number of Meetup.com denizens who'd found SVLUG via the Meetup.com page were now utterly convinced that SVLUG had ceased to exist, because, despite the careful annotations, they _could not conceive of it as anything but a Meetup_. Ergo, it was now a _dead_ Meetup. Just because one guy had ceased paying those clowns in NYC $180/year. In 2014, SVLUG found another kind gentleman willing to include the SVLUG Meetup among the three groups (I assume) he's paying for, but meanwhile the lesson — and the certainty of this problem recurring — is obvious: Basically, you don't own your Meetup in any way; Meetup, Inc. does. -- Cheers, "I am a member of a civilization (IAAMOAC). Step back Rick Moenfrom anger. Study how awful our ancestors had it, yet r...@linuxmafia.com they struggled to get you here. Repay them by appreciating McQ! (4x80) the civilization you inherited." -- David Brin ___ Basfa mailing list Basfa@lists.basfa.org http://lists.basfa.org/listinfo.cgi/basfa-basfa.org
