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

[Petr Viktorin]

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/