Meetup is cancelling "Meetup Everywhere" Blender Community Pages

Meetup has decided to cancel the free community pages many of us have been using to organize free Blender meetings.
Here’s the article: http://help.meetup.com/customer/portal/articles/1726205

They want us to all go to paid Meetup pages. As the organizer of the Los Angeles which is the biggest group on this Meetup Everywhere Community Pages I propose we find another free service or host our own calendar so free Blender groups have a free place to organize their user meetings.

We in Los Angeles have over 100 people on our list and we regularly get much bigger turn outs than the RSVPs count.

It will be over in less than two weeks. So what do the wise and informed BA users think is a good platform for us to recommend the users migrate to so we can make a decision and get the word out?

Thanks for everyone’s support up until now and through this transition and let’s keep the free meeting organizations going so let us know your suggestions.
Thanks, JT
Free Meetup Organizer

The pages are at:
http://www.meetup.com/blender
UPDATE: Ok, the above pages are gone now. Like gone gone. They give a doesn’t exist error now.
So if you don’t mind using the regular meetup pages you can find them here:
http://blender-3d.meetup.com
The maintainers of these groups get charged money for them so if they don’t have sponsors you might want to pitch in if they ask for a donation.

Yeah, I got a friendly call from Meetup from a woman who offered to convert all 423 communities on that page to paid accounts for only $4200 per month. Well… no.

I’ll find a solution on BlenderNation that will be available for free for everyone, stay tuned!

Bart

Sounds great. Blender Nation seems like the appropriate place for this now. Thanks!

Ya, Bart if you could come up with something. The free pages are totally in the core values of the free meetings and Blender being FOSS.
I was hoping to spin this squeaky wheel sooner but have been busy.

Several cities are growing and World Blender Meetup Day 2014 was a huge success. We are already starting planning on it for 2015.

Thanks, Bart, PM me if you need any help.

Here are a couple desired features.

  • if organizers can organize virtual meetings and broadcast to all groups the virtual meetings
    this will help with our webcast meetings and organizing World Blender “Meeting” Day 2015.
    Meetup only let you post on a handfull of groups then blocked further posts.
  • more requests coming soon, the cafe is shutting down, lol…

Yahoo Groups are still free. With them you can post events that folks receive email reminders of, and also upload files and pictures. Not a place to do virtual meetings. You only have to have a Yahoo account to organize, but the members can get email through other providers.

Thanks for the heads up JTA. We had some trouble ourselves getting the meetup account set up for CHIBUG. Currently we are rolling a FB page - https://www.facebook.com/groups/chibug/

I hope to get a site online with discourse.org. Will see what other options we may have. Feel free to email direct at [email protected]

W

Hey Wes. Cool, I’ll post the info in the MU page comments if you don’t. I’ve looked at MeetIn.org but my intuition tells me that scene won’t render! ; ) I also looked at using groups here but there is not enough functionality. Google+ just doesn’t fit the “free” moniker unless of course they provided beer for all the meetings then count me and all the people sitting on the sidewalk I pass daily in Downtown L.A. in on that gig! lol.

I’ve got a couple calendars on steroids that I am checking out too. Also Bart is looking into a comparable alternative. We need to do something quick though so we can start herding people off of the lists.

We also have many organizers in the Blender World MUD mailing list. I may setup a special email so people can just get on a list. I’ll decide by tomorrow and have as much as I can do alone done and launched Friday so we have a week to start herding all the cool cats.

I would prefer G+ to basically all of the other “social media” platforms - beyond just groups (and a pretty successful Blender one), there are some pretty awesome sharing features, including integration to email calendars.

I still like the idea of some form of BlenderNation or BlenderNetwork supported system… It would be nice to have it managed and maintained by the community itself, and not rely on some third party, as well as not making users have to sign up to yet another service.

That’s my two cents at least.

Thanks for the suggestion. Same as Goggle+ and hangouts, YG is not quite free. I’ve used Yahoo groups and as good as they are, a much simpler and free scheduler/calendar would suit us best as a direct replacement of what we are loosing.

I made a Facebook group for Seabug. Pros: big network (the biggest?) and free. Cons: Filters a lot of things unless you pay for exposure, and FB just rubs some people (especially in the FOSS community) the wrong way. https://www.facebook.com/groups/322788634593566/

Like youz guyz, I think I’m entering a period of poking any and all options (including the Seabug mailing list) to make sure people are kept in the know.

Facebook or Google would work fine for me.

Ok, since we are fast approaching the removal of the community pages I setup a temporary email for people to be notified on how to stay organized.

To stay in touch and keep connected please send your info to this address: communitypages \at/ socalblender /dot\ org

Please mention what location/community you are in and if you are an organizer.

You can also put in what your preference is on staying in touch for meeting announcements, like Facebook, Google+ for example.

Thanks and let’s stay organized!
JT

Ok then…It looks like MeetUp has been blocking the editing of the community pages Event Descriptions so I am unable to update them. And now it looks like I am unable to make posts to multiple community pages in the comment area. So hopefully we have gotten the word out to enough people who want to stay involved.

If not hopefully we can build the groups back up again when we have a good replacement platform.
Thanks for everyone’s support and I am so glad that we maintained a separate mailing list from the community pages so we still can contact most everyone in our group.

Good luck to everyone else in the other communities. I’ll keep posting here to keep us all connected as best as possible.

Blender on most awesome blenderheads!
JT

We have setup an interim calendar app on our SoCal Blender website so we have something. It is at http://communitypages.socalblender.org so this same subdomain will host or link to something permanent in the coming months. So you can bookmark it and count it it being there for Blenderheads world wide.

If you are organizing a Blender User Meeting please contact us at communitypages \at/ socalblender /dot\ org and we will give you a sign in so you can post your meetings. We will post more information on the calendar page so it makes it easy for everyone to stay in touch and organized. LET’S STAY ORGANIZED! Good luck to all.

Ok, the meetup.com/blender pages are gone now. Like gone gone. They give a doesn’t exist error now.
So if you don’t mind using the regular meetup pages you can find them here:
http://blender-3d.meetup.com
The maintainers of these groups get charged money for them so if they don’t have sponsors you might want to pitch in if they ask for a donation.

Thanks for everyone who posted Facebook pages and other ways to stay in touch. Let’s keep organized!
Thanks,
JT

4000 dollars??? holy cow. that is just nuts.

Bart has improved the Community>User Meetings section of BlenderNation.com. Thanks Bart!
SoCal meetings as well as other West Coast/USA and meetings around the world are posted here in addition to their own websites. If you have user meetings anywhere in the world please support Bart and BN along with Blenderheads everywhere by also posting your meetings on BN.

Browse the list of meetings >
Submit a meeting or event to be listed >