Meetup.com offering for LoCo teams

[Elizabeth K. Joseph]

On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 8:06 AM, David Planella
<david.planella at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> After having discussed it with the Community and LoCo Councils, I would like
> to present a proposal to offer meetup.com subscription to our Ubuntu local
> communities:
>
>     https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoTeams/MeetupProposal
>
> As community and LoCo team members, at this point I'd like to ask you for
> your input and thoughts on how to move forward with this proposal.

Thank you for putting together this proposal.

I'll start off by saying that I'm really proud of the work that the
developers did on the LoCo Team Portal. Our community developed an
open source platform that's being used by Ubuntu communities all over
the world, and has been hugely effective at collecting resources for
events our teams are doing in one spot. Huge thanks to everyone who
has done work on it, I will continue to appreciate it as we will keep
on using it in the California Team :)

I'm not proud of seeing us use a proprietary, paid for solution. But
at the same time, our team uses proprietary social media outlets (G+,
FB, Twitter) so I think we've already collectively made a decision to
have these in our toolbox in the name of discoverability and
engagement with our community. Meetup takes this one step further and
brings our events specifically to the attention of Meetup members who
have similar interests.

Like other teams, we have explored the idea of using Meetup and hashed
out pros/cons at a California team meeting last December:
http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2014/12/15/%23ubuntu-us-ca.html#t03:37

The meeting brought out a lot of good pros/cons of using it, so it's
worth reading if you're interested. At that meeting we didn't really
come to a conclusion, but kept the possibility of using it open in the
future.

As another data point, one of our LoCo members did use Meetup for
advertising Ubuntu Hours a few years back (he was using a GNU/Linux
branded meetup group, and included Ubuntu Hours as one of the event
types they did). The Ubuntu Hours prior to using Meetup had been just
2-5 people and usually the same ones, after he started using Meetup he
could depend on always having a few new people coming to each Ubuntu
Hour. It did add "one more thing" to our ever-growing list of places
to update when we have an event (LTP, mailing list announcement,
social media...) but I think it was worth the organization effort.

Ultimately, I begrudgingly accept that using Meetup is a good idea and
will be helpful to the teams where Meetup is popular. I believe it'll
make a huge difference for event attendance here in San Francisco
where Meetup is very popular.

-- 
Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph || Lyz || pleia2