I admit I find this change aggravating, but Meetup has the right to do this. I still consider it the optimum way to get people of common interests together. Read the site and learn all you can about how best to handle the costs and so forth. Meetup offers an early bird discount for those Organizers who join now.
This could serve as an opportunity to bring many Ayn Rand Meetup members on board with SOLO. If we could offer the same benefits as Meetup without the associated costs, we might generate some interest.
The main benefits are the ability to set up calendar events with automated notices e-mailed directly to members and the ability to track RSVPs.
Joe, could you please take some time to examine the link at
to see which, if any, of the listed functions the SOLO server can replicate?
I can understand Meetup wanting to charge for their services, but the "regular" rate of $19 per month per group I find outrageous, and even the "discounted" rate of $9 per month per group is steep. I predict that many current Meetups will simply evaporate. I know the Organizer for the Atheists Meetup near me has already said she will not pay the fee.
Fortunately I'm not an organizer for either of the meet-ups I'm a member of (Georgia Objectivists and the French meet-up), but I'm not going to pay for the service at this time. Although it was a good idea, I haven't actually been able to make any of the meetings for either group yet. I also haven't been contacted directly by anyone on either group, so it doesn't seem to be a good place to connect with people individually either.
This whole approach is a dismal indication of how Objectivists typically get things wrong in attracting new adherents as opposed to organized religion.
How on earth are you going to charge someone for something when you haven't even convinced him/her of the value of what you are doing? Peer pressure? Are the main organizers out to lunch reality-wise?
Anyone can go into practically any church anywhere and hear a sermon for free. Contributions are requested, not required. Money pressure is only put on after the person converts (i.e. considers a religion as a serious value).
How about learning something here? Translating this approach to the rational philosophy realm, why not make general membership free, open to all, but offer attractive paid advantages and percs for those who wish them (i.e. the "more converted")?
I sympathize with your comments but they're misplaced. This is being done by the meetup site management, not by the individual groups that compose that site (i.e., not by Objectivists - or anyone else who has a group on meetup).
Kat, of course I am talking to you. In fact, I hope to meet your love interest Michael this Saturday if I can talk him into appearing at our Meetup.
Speaking of Meetup, I think their leaders are purging or consolidating unused Meetups in preparation for their fee scheme.
I would like to see an exchange of ideas here about how we can provide a home for the newly evicted Ayn Rand Meetup members. I just posted a message to the global Ayn Rand Meetup message board about this at
Using current SOLO server technology, we can at least have these members register at SOLO and participate in the forums. Meanwhile, SOLO Local Club Coordinators can list regular monthly meetup (lower case "m") dates, times and locations on their main pages for each city in their state, province or country. In other words, employing the same regularity that Meetup normally encourages will make the switch to SOLO a snap for most of these Ayn Rand Meetups.
If Joe and the other programmers can develop some way of creating automated calendar event notices and RSVPs, so much the better. But I do not see that as necessary given that we still offer a free service while Meetup now wants to charge a considerable fee. I would not mind paying one flat fee to organize many groups, but I consider their per group fee of $9 to $19 per month unreasonable.
Speaking only for myself as SOLO-GA coordinator, I wouldn't mind sending a standard e-mail to remind my members of a meeting we scheduled in the SOLO-GA forum. Also, having a thread in my forum with the name as something like "SOLO meeting 04/xx/05, xx:xx pm" would serve the same function as the Meetup's "Events" page (i.e., to see all events at a glance). Your suggestion of having the next meeting on the local club's main page is a great one too.
Jason
Luke Setzer Club Coordinator, RoR Florida Coordinator
Jason, that sounds good. I have set up a table listing the only currently active Meetup we have in Merritt Island at the SOLO Florida main page but left the links to the Meetups alone for now. As we get more cities involved in SOLO, we can add rows to the table but keep a common discussion theme for follow-up on the SOLO Florida Discussion board. Perhaps others will want to follow this format or have their own ideas.
I think it is pretty funny that they are doing this. What were they thinking haha!?!
They claim they they are doing something great by charging on a per group basis instead of a per member basis. That is ridiculous! I doubt if anyone will ever create a new group at meetup.com with this policy.
If they were smart, then in my opinion they would go with a per member policy. Free for the first 6 members, and then once a group has 7 members, its $.10 per user per month. Have a cap of $5 per month for a group.
Or maybe offer limited functions to groups who don't pay... Anything but this! The idiots! Or maybe they have enough larger groups that they will profit from this? I don't know.
I'm a little hesitant to promising new features right now. SOLOC 4 is coming soon and I've got a pile of other things that need to be started at this point. There might be a few features that could be easily done, like setting up mail lists for coordinators. Really, every local group should be able to receive posts on their forum via email...I just haven't gotten around to it. If people pester me, I might do it quicker.
What I would like is a comprehensive list of detailed features that we could eventually add. Luther mentioned a calendar feature with automatic reminders. Do you have an example of it? Anything else?
For now, posting events to the local club's forums is probably the best idea, as I'm not sure how many people routinely visit the club front pages. That has the advantage of showing up on the front page.
It'd be great to take advantage of this change and get people coming over to SOLO.
Joe, please join the Aurora group so you can see how it works from the group leader perspective and check out all the features that Meet-up offers. This group is inactive and I signed on as leader. If you join soon, I can switch it over to you to give you the insider perspective. You can, of course, leave at any time.
Some of the features Meet-up offers are group emails, downloadable files, customizable cards and flyers, club leaders have the ability to edit posts, calendar, automatic reminders, rsvp with comments and more. And its very easy to use. These meet-up guys got it all going on. Check it out.
Joe, Kat is right to say that the best way to understand Meetup is to serve as an Organizer. I also grabbed a few Meetups in California near the SOLOC 4 Beach House. So I can hand one of those to you if you want to play with one closer to home. Here they are:
NEW YORK (AP) - Groups of Michael Moore fans, stay-at-home moms, Dungeons & Dragons players and pug owners face a choice this month: Should their organizers pay a monthly fee to stay with Meetup.com?
The Web site, best known for bringing together supporters of Howard Dean during last year's presidential election, is instituting a $19 monthly fee for new groups. Current groups can pay a $9 monthly rate at least through the end of the year.
Meetup quoted Bob Dylan to explain the fees: "You gotta serve somebody." Its site also said, "There's no such thing as a free lunch."
The formerly free service brings like-minded people together by letting visitors pick an interest, like speaking Japanese, then enter a ZIP code to see if there's an event at a coffee shop, bar or other nearby venue.
Democracy for America, a group that grew out of Dean's campaign, will pay at least the first monthly fee for its more than 400 Meetup chapters, said Noreen Nielsen, a spokeswoman. Meetup, she said, "is, in many ways, the heart and soul of our organization."
Joe Trippi, the former Dean campaign manager, said the fees "seem pretty reasonable."
"It's in the spirit of Meetup.com, which was not really about making a ton of money, but giving people tools to meet and form communities," he said.
Groups' organizers will pay the fee and can decide if they want to pass on their costs to group members.
Most Meetup groups have five members or less, said Myles Weissleder, a company spokesman.
Groups that may have trouble are those with no appointed organizer, such as the Arlington/Irving (Texas) Atheists Meetup Group. Groups with only one member, such as the Death Rock Meetup Group of Logan, Utah, may find the fee is, well, the kiss of death.
Luke Setzer Club Coordinator, RoR Florida Coordinator
If you want to join the discussion there to sing the praises of SOLO, thus encouraging other readers there to come on board with us, now would be a good time.
You could mention on the thread that we have several TOC staff with membership accounts here (including Ed Hudgins who has an article here), we've invited Will Thomas to speak at one of our conferences, they've invited Lindsay to speak at theirs, and they register SOLO local clubs on their site. It's not quite the bad blood he makes it out to be, at least with TOC.
Luke Setzer Club Coordinator, RoR Florida Coordinator
I managed to contact as many of the Ayn Rand Meetup members as I could under the given time constraints, but I have hit the new, lower limits to contact for now. Some of the larger Meetups in NYC and North Texas look like they will remain with Meetup, but Joe reports numbers suggesting many of the members of smaller Meetups have moved to SOLO.
Over time, I would like to see some of the independent Objectivist Clubs move to SOLO. Hopefully, the KASS factor will encourage them to make this move. I welcome suggestions.
