On 11/18/2015 11:16 PM, Laura Creighton wrote:
In a message of Wed, 18 Nov 2015 22:34:15 +0100, "M.-A. Lemburg" writes:
Hello PSF Community,
as many of you know, meeptup.com is pretty much the standard when it comes to organizing user group meetings - at least in the US, the UK and probably also some other countries.
Now, meetup.com is also a rather expensive service to use and with the PSF funding the fees, I'd like to investigate, whether encouraging use of alternative services wouldn't result in a better use of the PSFs grant funds.
These are some services I've found:
* http://www.eventbrite.com/ (free for free events) * https://www.farornear.com/ (free) * http://attending.io/ (free) * https://www.xing.com/de/events (free for free events, much like eventbrite, used often in Germany)
For BarCamps:
* https://www.barcamptools.eu/ (again, mostly in Germany)
Some questions:
* Do you know other such services ? * What's your experience with these ? * If you're running a group on meetup.com, would you be willing to move to a different platform ?
I think it would be good to collect this information on a python.org wiki page to better guide new user groups to meetup.com alternatives.
Thanks, -- Marc-Andre Lemburg Director Python Software Foundation http://www.python.org/psf/ http://www.malemburg.com/
In the USA, I think it is still hopeless. (It was a decade ago, when I last looked into it.) The problem was that meetup.com so dominates the field in the USA that a majority of Americans believe that, should they be looking for a group about X, they can check meetup.com, and, if they don't find a group, then that group does not exist. No further checking is needed.
This means, if you want to attract new members, you have to have a meetup.com presence. And, this, of course means that the heuristic 'if it doesn't have a meetup.com, it doesn't exist' becomes more and more true. This must be rather nice for meetup.com -- despite many efforts, theirs is a monopoly which seems very hard to break.
I talked to more than a dozen people who really hate meetup.com, and the message was the same --it was the only way to reach new potential members -- so it was more or less irrelevant to ask them if they would be willing to use a different service. The answer was 'in addition to meetup.com , i.e. to actually have the meetings -- oh yes, we do that. But we still have to pay the meetup.com fees for a meetup.com online presence, or else we would never attract new members.
I'd be happy to see that this has changed.
Hello from the Czech Republic, where meetup.com is not used that much. There are three cities with Python meetups: Prague - uses Lanyrd.com [0], and somehow manages to have good attendance Brno - Lanyrd [1] and Facebook. It seems it's mainly the Facebook event that draws in the people Ostrava - srazy.info [2] (a Czech service), and Facebook. (Plus a rudimentary Lanyrd entry just to show up on a shared calendar.) Again, Facebook seems to reach most people. In September, an expat looked at meetup.com and concluded that there are no Python meetups in Prague, so he founded one. There was one instance of that [3]. The Prague events are on meetup.com since then [4], but I don't think it makes that much of a dent in attendance. I guess the upshot is that instead of having one expensive service, you could have Facebook (which is pretty hostile for any kind of interaction other than being glued to their feed all day), or even put the info on several sites and update each one individually. [0] praha.pyvo.cz [1] brno.pyvo.cz [2] ostrava.pyvo.cz [3] http://www.meetup.com/czech-python-meetup/ [4] http://www.meetup.com/Prague-Python-Meetup-NaPyVo/