Hey everybody,
On Tuesday of DrupalCon Seattle week I attended the Community Summit. One of the (literal) roundtable discussions I was involved with was for virtual meetups. I was going email a braindump directly to Adam Varn (the current coordinator of Florida's upcoming virtual meetup initiative), but I figured it would be more valuable to post it here to gather (hopefully) additional feedback.
Carie Fisher, one of the organizers of Accessibility Talks (https://www.youtube.com/c/AccessibilityTalks), pointed me to a GitHub repo (https://github.com/cehfisher/accessibility-talks) that includes a nice checklist for organizing virtual meetups.
She also suggested that we have multiple people (not just Adam) helping with promotion and actively encourage others to retweet and share info about upcoming talks.
We also discussed using Zoom's new realtime captioning functionality in order to make meetups as accessible as possible. Then, after each meetup, upload the video to YouTube and then use our networks to share again.
Kaleem Clarkson from Atlanta spoke highly of https://www.crowdcast.io/ - I believe this might be an alternative to Zoom.
I'm looking forward to kicking things off next month!
-mike