At the meetup tonight at Phase2, Amber and Greg mentioned that our Meetup group’s future is unknown at this point now that our beloved organizer is less involved here in Portland.
The options I recall hearing were:
- Shut it down and move our efforts to groups.drupal.org/portland
- Find a person who wants to host it / add it to their account
- Have a company sponsor it (it’s currently $14 / month)
Please correct me if I missed something!
I propose we go with option 2 or option 3 (or both 2 and 3) and keep the Meetup group going. Even though Meetup has its share of issues (cost being one of them), I do think it’s worth keeping, especially since there are 480+ members in the Meetup group right now.
To those who haven’t used it as an organizer, I think it’s great for promoting events, sending out event reminders, suggesting events to non-members (aka discovery) who have similar interests in content management, open source software, etc.
Yeah, I like Meetup :) I have a paid Meetup account (I host a couple meetup groups, including ClimbPDX — check it out if you love or have in interest in rock climbing!), and I’m happy to be an organizer of record in order to help keep the DUG going. My account permits up to 3 groups, and I’m only hosting 2 at this point, so there’s no extra cost for me.
Please discuss, and thanks for asking me to post this, Amber!
Comments
To Meetup or not...
I first found the Portland Drupal group through Meetup, so I like it, but my main concern is accuracy in keeping the DUG information updated in two places. Last month I went to the location listed on Meetup, only to find a locked building with no one there.
If we keep Meetup, then we need to make sure all information matches the Portland Drupal group.
To Meetup or not...
I first found the Portland Drupal group through Meetup, so I like it, but my main concern is accuracy in keeping the DUG information updated in two places. Last month I went to the location listed on Meetup, only to find a locked building with no one there.
If we keep Meetup, then we need to make sure all information matches the Portland Drupal group.
Agreed!
This is definitely a solvable problem. I’m sorry to hear you ended up at the wrong place last month :(
Willing to help out
I'd also be willing to help out in keeping things up-to-date. I want to get more active in the local Drupal community.
I did a self-hosted meetup
I did a self-hosted meetup for a long time, but switching to meetup.com gets a lot of "network effects". I am for it, even if it means a few more minutes of work.
By the same token, do we have other social media accounts or groups?
Also how do we get listed here? https://calagator.org/events
etc...
Ryan Price
DrupalEasy Podcast
Calagator
You get listed on calagator by submitting to it. It's a manual process, but there might be a way to do recurring events.
Amber Matz
That manual process could be
That manual process could be the only way since we have a rotating location, but I'll look into it.
Ryan Price
DrupalEasy Podcast
The VBA person in me thought
The VBA person in me thought of querying meet-up API into an excel sheet and then make a macro to automatically fill up the 'Add an event' form in https://calagator.org/events/new each time an event is added in the meet-up account. :')
Or better yet, use Google apps script and use Javascript to call the meet-up api and populate google sheet in the google drive, then fill up the 'Add an event' form.
https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/services/external
https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/sheets/functions
It will be nice to make those kind of scripts ,,,
Just thinking outloud ,, :)
They do have an iCal
They do have an iCal importer, we just need to make all the events in Meetup or on GDO here and then import them into Calagator.
Ryan Price
DrupalEasy Podcast