A few years ago I decided to spend some of my time organizing a Meetup about cloud computing in Turin, Italy. I got support from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation to get a paid account to Meetup.com, food and drinks. I organized various events in Turin and Milan as well. We had a good time and I worked with different companies to help them share what they are building or passionate about.
I work remotely and it was for me the best way to connect with other people in my area working on similar challenges. The event was in English because a video maker was there recording and mounting videos to share on the CNCF blog, or with the companies or communities the speaker was involved with.
COVID-19 changed our daily routine drastically as you know and I embraced virtual events as many others did. We gained good popularity and we reached 800 people registered to our meetup group, but we have missed the locality part of all of this . In the meantime I decided to take a break as an active organizer, leaving my spot to another person who supported me a lot during the day to day operations. I left my role as CNCF Ambassador and in the meantime the CNCF decided to move all those communities out from Meetup.com to their internal platform.
I don’t want to comment on their internal platform, the migration was left to the organizer, at some point we were maintaining events on both platforms having the end of 2022 as the deadline to close the Meetup.com group.
In the meantime I tried to export the people who trusted me as organizer to import them elsewhere but the attendees belong to Meetup.com and there is not much you can do about it, Meetup.com locks you in.
What about deleting a Meetup group? Well, apparently you can remove all the organizers and leave it in a limbo until Meetup.com removes it, or until somebody else claims to be the new organizer.
Really! You work a couple of years to build a group of people who trust you, your way of dealing with their time and when you decide that it is time to move on the best Meetup offers is to leave those people on their own. Obviously just as it happens with DNS the last day before termination somebody else claimed to be the new organizer and took over the meetup group to share their own event. Luckily it was a person I collaborated with in the past and I was able to become the organizer again. It took me 2 hours to do the right things. I had to kick out of the meetup group all 800 members one by one leaving an empty group that nobody has any reason to claim.
It is my responsibility as organizer to take care of what happens to the people who trusted me, and I think leaving them on their own to the first person that finds itself in the right place, at the right time is wrong and you should not trust a platform forcing this behavior.
Avoid Meetup.com, you can do better! Setup a mailing list, build a static website on GitHub.com, write a few lines of whatever language you want to learn and expose an HTTP server.
I like to share what I do and to experiment. In the last 10 years I organized meetups, I tried to self-publish a book, I wrote on my blog and many of you trusted me, leaving their emails to me and sharing their own time. The only reasonable thing I can do is to clean up after myself when I am done. A few years ago when I realized that the book I was trying to write didn’t make much sense I deleted the 2000 people who registered to receive updates about it because it is the right thing to do. If you find yourself in a similar situation do the right thing, cleanup after yourself.