Weekly updates

Hello to all our Deputies, WordCamp organizers, Meetup wranglers, and WordPress Community builders! You were probably hard at work this weekend. Tell us what you got accomplished in our #weekly-update!

Have you run into a roadblock with the stuff you’re working on? Head over to #community-events or #community-team in Slack and ask for help!

Italian Community – Vetted a few meetups, held orientation and now working on creating meetups
WCEU – Setup for the year to come!
Core – Writing a few proposals to increase our outreach for new contributors, to be discussed with the rest of the release squad. Agenda, meeting.

I mentioned last week that our meetup speaker for 9/15 had to cancel. On top of that, when I arrived at the venue, the street and several streets around it were blocked off for a bicycle race. The result was a small enough group that I began to think it would have been better to cancel. (Also, it’s a reminder to check ahead of time to see whether there are any events happening in the vicinity of the meetup.) On the other hand, those of us who were there got some value out if it, and I’ve already had to cancel at least one meetup this year.

But situations like this bring up concerns I have about Meetup.com, because for the past several months, it has seemed as if messages I send to the mailing list just go into a void. Our discussion list used to be pretty lively (someone would ask a question and there would be a dozen responses). I’m starting to think there might be some email deliverability issues with the mailing lists, and wondering whether I ought to try to set up some alternative means of communication. (And that annoys me because the whole POINT of Meetup.com is to make it easier to get a group together.)

And it seems as though every time I log on to meetup.com, another useful feature is missing or hidden. (It was unbelievably difficult to find a complete list of past meetups for our 10-year anniversary last month; going through all of them to find out about my ratio of female and minority speakers is going to be hell.)

I’ll stop whining now, but am wondering whether any other meetup organizers are running into these issues with the meetup.com website.

That’s really disappointing to hear Sallie, and thanks for sharing that experience. I’d also like to know more about problems with meetup.com from other meetup organizers !

We’ve noticed for Ottawa that many of our outreach emails go unanswered, yet many members ask us when our next event is happening despite being registered on Meetup.com.