[PSF-Community] Looking for alternatives to meetup.com

[Nick Coghlan]

On 19 November 2015 at 14:04, Jacqueline Kazil <jackiekazil at gmail.com> wrote:
> What about trying to negotiate a deal w/ meetup for a bulk buy?

This community thread was actually born from a Board discussion on
that topic. It turns out meetup.com's approach to centralised group
sponsorship for non-profits is to offer Meetup Pro
(http://www.meetup.com/pro/) at the same per-group price they charge
individual community organisers (i.e. $15 USD per group per month),
but with the charges still going to the sponsoring organisation rather
than the group leads. (I don't know what the normal corporate rate is
for Pro, but it's presumably more than the community organiser rate)

As such, while it would save the PSF and group leaders some overhead
in processing the grant requests for Meetup fee reimbursements, it
likely wouldn't save any money overall. and could potentially cost
more, since:

* some Python user groups are currently on the cheaper Basic plan,
while the non-profit Pro rate matches the Unlimited plan
* prices for individual group organisers apparently vary by region
(although http://www.meetup.com/pricing/ will only show you local
pricing based on geolocation, so I'd be interested to hear what other
folks see on that page)
* there are many user groups where meetup.com fees are currently
covered by generous individuals, local businesses, or other
organisations, and those groups would now have an incentive to to seek
PSF fee sponsorship instead

In relation to that last point, going down this path would also make
the meetup.com proprietary lock-in problem even worse, since one of
the purposes of Meetup Pro is to serve as a communications channel
between the sponsoring organisation and the group organisers:
http://help.meetup.com/customer/en/portal/articles/2141922-meetup-pro

We'd either have to not use those features, or else end up in a
situation where Python meetups were actively *disadvantaged* in their
communications with the PSF by opting out of using meetup.com.

The clumsiness of the status quo certainly isn't ideal, but the fact
it leaves the choice of which meetup management platform to use in the
hands of local organisers is a really nice feature we'd like to
retain.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia