VANDUG + meetup.com

Posted by arianek on April 5, 2011 at 3:48am

Hi all -

So, I was asking about this a bit on the Twitters (was going to email SteveK, but figured there may be others interested in more info so posting here instead).

I'm wanted to express some concerns about moving to Meetup.com, and have been wondering exactly what the motivations of that are (aside from recruiting more attendees).

From what I understand, the main idea was some cross-marketing of the meetup to people who aren't usually on g.d.o, and for the first while signups on g.d.o worked as well as on Meetup.com. But for the latest, the signups on g.d.o have been disabled entirely.

My concerns about this

Decentralizing the logs of who signed up from g.d.o kinda sucks, because then the data no longer lives in a place that's accessible to the site admins.
Lots of people don't have Meetup.com accounts, and (like myself), don't want to sign up for one only to RSVP for meetups.
RSVPing for meetups was not required before, but it seems that because of the successful marketing on Meetup.com, it now is due to group size constraints. So there's no longer an option of not RSVPing.
It forks where meetups for Drupal User Groups are posted, so comments and attendees on the posts on the two sites are divided - I think it's important to keep this info centralized.
Making Meetup.com the main organizing site keeps new attendees and Drupal users segregated off of g.d.o and drupal.org - which can be important inroads to other groups and information they would be interested in.

Solutions

If the issue is marketing, obviously that has been successful. But this is leaving some long-time attendees and supporters out by moving to Meetup.com. If the intent is to grow the group, it is clear to me that we need to find a larger space that can accommodate everyone, and let people who do not RSVP on Meetup.com be able to attend.
Centralization is important - I believe g.d.o should be the primary post/signup, and that if Meetup.com is used, it should be secondary and refer people back to g.d.o. This will help integrate new attendees into the community, and also keep the logs of the events/signups in a centralized place.
If the issue is functionality of g.d.o that is lacking, then perhaps we should consider doing a sprint to roll some patches for g.d.o. It's maintained by only a few people, and I'm sure they would appreciate some support in maintaining and extending the infrastructure.

Conclusion

I obviously feel pretty strongly about this. If I'm an anomaly and nobody else cares, then I will totally suck it up and stop asking questions! ;) But I would like some transparency around this either way.

I'm super thankful to the new meet-up organizers, but I think that more major decisions about how the group is organized should be up for consensus decision-making style discussions/feedback, because they do have further-reaching implications, and in general I don't really feel like this change is in line with doing things "The Drupal Way".

Would very much appreciate some clarity on the decision, plans to deal with the growth/signups, and also others' opinions on this.

Comments

Meetup + Facebook + etc.

Posted by tonychung on April 5, 2011 at 6:52am

While the "best" option would be to keep everything in g.d.o, I prefer the social networking aspect of Meetup.com . Aside from the $30/month that some sponsor needs to pay for the privilege of hosting the account, Meetup works quite well for what it does. You may be an anomaly, where you would ONLY attend one meetup. But others who hold Meetup accounts use the service for more than one meetup group.

Meetup also provides a function to login through your Facebook or Twitter accounts, so it's not like you're really setting up a new account: If you're already logged into one of those other services, you could be logged into Meetup at the same time!

Perhaps this could be averted by a social networking plugin between g.d.o and meetup, so that events and registrations would be synced between both servers. Kind of like Git for social networking. ;-)

Hope you get more responses, Ariane.

You're not alone

Posted by izmeez on April 5, 2011 at 2:19pm

Ariane,

Just to let you know you are not alone with questions on this. It is unfortunate you were not at the February meeting. I came with my portable camp chair and at the end of the meeting asked questions about the requirements of using meetup. It was a good open discussion and several other people shared their thoughts both pro and con. I also came to the March meeting with my camp chair and found that despite the "waiting list" there were many no-shows unlike the February meeting and there were many chairs to spare. As always the group is welcoming of everyone.

I realize that many people use facebook, twitter, etc but I do not see the solution to lie in creating linkages unless they are clearly not implemented as requirements.

Thanks for taking the time to start this discussion,

Izzy

You're not an anomaly,

Posted by CatherineOmega on April 5, 2011 at 3:25pm

You're not an anomaly, Ariane. I definitely agree that this is at the very least a conversation worth having.

Meetup is annoying. It's inconvenient and it tries to be too much. Frankly, I would just like it to automatically output a calendar feed with everything in all my Meetup groups scheduled in it and then not have to worry. Easy.

But I digress. A LITTLE.

In the past year, I've taken to asking myself "how does this get me where I want to be?" when making business decisions. Otherwise, it's easy to lose sight.

Welcoming new people into the Drupal community should be the first goal of the meetups. That means funnelling them here to GDO. That means having a Drupal.org account. That means at least knowing that IRC exists. We should assume that these are the requirements for interaction within the community. (Or at the very least, working for a Drupal shop with people who have the above.)

Now, certainly the methods we use for self-organizing and communicating could be improved upon. But adopting an external one is not the way to go. Meetup has been great for attracting more people, and I think GDO/Meetup integration would be great, but the module to do so is in its infancy: http://groups.drupal.org/node/121309

I want to really avoid entering into a "technical solutions for social problems" kind of discussion, but is it possible that some of the messaging and so forth that GDO does could be improved upon in the short term? Reminders, and so on? Beyond the fact that a lot of people use it already and are notified of the meetup by virtue of the fact that they're ON Meetup already, what are the features of Meetup that we actually do like? (Maybe this is a discussion we should have elsewhere?)

I guess the direct question now: how do we account for people who RSVP on the Drupal site and not on Meetup?

Don't cut off your right hand to get better with your left one..

Posted by fp on April 5, 2011 at 4:54pm

@arianek says:

g.d.o should be the primary post/signup, and that if Meetup.com is used, it should be secondary and refer people back to g.d.o

I subscribe to the intent of this idea. In my view we should allow for both to accommodate for personal preferences. To sort of complement this thought, @CatherineOmega says:

how do we account for people who RSVP on the Drupal site and not on Meetup?

I think this brings up to a more fundamental question: do we actually need signups? I think not. Since some people who sign up don't come to the meetups, it's only fair that people who don't sign up show up.

Space has never been an issue. Maybe once or twice but never in a sustained manner. It will become an issue the day it becomes really uncomfortable to attend or that we need to refuse the entry to someone. That's certainly a good problem to have because it is an indicator of the health of our community. Let's cross the bridge when we get to the river.

Not to hijack the thread but since @CatherineOmega digressed (a little), allow me to also do so (a little too):

Welcoming new people into the Drupal community should be the first goal of the meetups.

I think this approach is wrong (although I suspect that it's not intentional on Catherine's part and it just semantics). I think it's wrong because it puts the wellbeing and growth of the "existing members" second (no offense to the Vancouver Ubuntu LoCo but I think this is in my opinion where they fail to reach me). This said, I agree that welcoming new people should be one of the top goals of our community.

Cheers!

Thanks for all the thoughts

Posted by arianek on April 5, 2011 at 6:01pm

Thanks for all the thoughts folks - it's good to know where everyone is at on this.

@Francis - the reason I thought that signups were mandatory is because it says clearly on g.d.o to RSVP on meetup.com (and the signups on g.d.o for April are disabled). The most recent meetup I attended was James Sherrett's presentation in January, and there were people spilling out the door and sitting on the floor, the room was definitely over-full so I thought this was an ongoing issue.

If it's fine for people not to RSVP on Meetup, and still show up, then that's great!

@all - That said, this still doesn't address some of the issues of helping to funnel/integrate new people into g.d.o/d.o and into the larger community, or about keeping the stats/signups (if there are signups, which I think are actually useful) on g.d.o just for the purposes of having logs of this.

I'm not as opposed to having a secondary post on Meetup.com, but I do think that g.d.o should still be the central location for the information. If there are just small annoyances with the g.d.o functionality, it would be cool to do a sprint on g.d.o improvements and help out the entire community rather than splitting off to another site, no?

Feedback

Posted by SteveK on April 5, 2011 at 10:04pm

Hey Ariane,

thanks for bringing this up. I agree with the majority of your concerns and am not a big fan of moving the entire community off of g.d.o. For the past couple of meetups I've disabled as much "discussion" functionality from meetup.com in order to revert it back to g.d.o. I've also always linked back to the original g.d.o post for anyone interested in continuing conversation. I've tested this out for last months meetup and was pleasantly surprised at the results.

Meetup post: http://www.meetup.com/Vancouver-Drupal-Users-Group/events/16513649/ no discussion (minus Catherine's post)

G.D.O post: http://groups.drupal.org/node/134164 13 comments (though, not of high quality ;)

Signups and Registrations

Meetup.com has been doing a fantastic job in attracting individuals not directly involved in our local community. I've had a number of people come up to me mentioning that they wouldn't have known about this meetup if they didn't catch it on meetup.com. As a community, we should be focused on growing some arms to reach out to these people and make it more accommodating for them to attend. From their perspective, why should they register on g.d.o in order to attend an event? why can't they use their twitter/fb/meetup account to attend?

Here are some signup stats.

Meetup.com Feb Signups: 30 (first month using meetup.com)
G.D.O Feb Signups: 6

Meetup.com Feb Signups: 40 + ~10 waitlist
G.D.O Feb Signups: 5

Meetup.com March Signups: 40 + ~6 waitlist
G.D.O March Signups: 3

So far, space hasn't been an issue. We've since moved into the larger Bootup Labs space to accommodate for the growth. If you show up with your own chair, we're not going to kick you out :) As Francis said, until we start getting 80+ people attending these meetups on a regular basis, we shouldn't have to worry about this.

now... here's my list of arguments for meetup.com:

Meetup.com gives great exposure to outside networks. Otherwise, people would only know about meetups if they already knew about g.d.o. It also gives us access to their existing user base and users who are on facebook and twitter.
Attracts new attendees with an easy to use signup process
takes care of the known "social" issues that we have in Vancouver. ie: if it's raining out, we can easily remind everyone to mark themselves as "not attending" in order for people in the waitlist to have a chance to attend.
G.d.o signup process is horrible and lacks the functionality that we need to run proper events. I'd be interested in helping out on a sprint, though.
it doesn't directly sign them up on g.d.o but does get them immediately involved within the local community. Personally, I find this much more beneficial for new attendees to get instant exposure within the community. It's much easier for me to familiarize myself with someone who has a name, face, and personality than just an alias on g.d.o. Maybe this would also encourage them to get more involved with Drupal?
I periodically also post this event on other sites such as craigslist, upcoming, etc... How do we instantly funnel these leads? meetup converts easily. g.d.o, not quite...
Great community tools for communicating to the group, attendees, waitlist, individuals, etc
Maps integration, pricing, email reminders, gcal, ical...

and my arguments against:

Doesn't directly funnel new users to signup on g.d.o in order to attend though, I'd be interested in hearing how many people signup after the fact.
it decentralizes our main group page. no one likes community forking.
It costs money. ($36 for 6 months?)

Community Goals

I agree with Francis. One of our goals should be community outreach. I find that this is something that we haven't been doing too well in the past. It's great to see new faces at our events and we should be accommodating for these new individuals, but we must take care of our existing members who regularly attend. Topic presentations, meetup accessibility, opportunities to be involved and participate, etc...

So far, I haven't seen any disruption with the regulars not being able to attend. has there really been much change in how you come to community events? feedback?

One of my main goals in taking over the leadership role of the VanDug group was to expose our tight knit local community to the general techies of Vancouver. I want to grow this community into a forum of quality discussion and participation as well as a place for anyone who is interested in Drupal to attend and feel comfortable learning about the platform that most of us use and work with everyday.

I'd like to propose a scrum at the next meetup to look into finding a solution to these issues so that we can all come to middle ground and address any issues that may be solved with a code sprint for functional changes in g.d.o event planning. I believe change is necessary for us in order to grow into a healthy and flourishing community. Unfortunately, shaking up the snowglobe a bit usually causes a storm :). Let's look ahead to clear skies.

I work at The Jibe Multimedia, Inc.

Thanks Steve - you've

Posted by arianek on April 5, 2011 at 11:34pm

Thanks Steve - you've addressed some of my biggest concerns here, so much appreciated!

I was fully under the impression that attendees were now required to RSVP to come (implied by the waitlist on meetup.com and the disabled signups on g.d.o), but if that is not the case, then fantastic. (Btw, I believe the lower number of signups on g.d.o is simply a result of people generally not signing up there, as it was not required, but still attending - so shouldn't be correlated with attendance via g.d.o vs. meetup.com)

I can see that Meetup has a nicer interface, and additional functionality - but I guess I tend to think like Catherine on this whole more pragmatic aspect, ie. what (concretely) is it achieving? It obviously helps with getting new attendees though.

I see your point about people from Meetup.com not wanting to sign up on g.d.o (since that is their originating site, just as g.d.o is mine) - if we have the option/preference not to require RSVPs then that does make this fairly moot. But if they are required, I still believe it's better to keep everything centralized on g.d.o (for the reasons I posted above).

Catherine just asked on IRC #drupal-pnw and I thought I'd post here that if anyone wants to take the initiative to write out some specs or organize some g.d.o sprinting, it's probably best to cross-post to http://groups.drupal.org/maintenance and the somewhat redundant http://groups.drupal.org/groups-drupal-org - there is also an IRC channel #drupal-groups that usually only has a handful of people, but greggles is usually there, and he's been the main g.d.o maintainer for a while.

Glad many of you are interested in being engaged in these conversations! I will do my best to come to the next meetup, and if I can't be there in person, I will gladly join on UStream or Skype.

g.d.o infra

Posted by arianek on April 6, 2011 at 12:00am

FYI - I just pinged greggles on IRC and he said it would be fantastic if there is specific functionality that anyone would want to help with for g.d.o. He said to post in the Maintenance group (or in the g.d.o issue queue to discuss), and that he's happy to facilitate and provide some guidance.

It could be interesting to get Meetup.com and g.d.o to talk to each other too so that they're both used but integrated... (I have no idea how open their system is though, or whether that's possible).

But if anyone wants to follow up, it seems there is a lot of possibilities here!