HSL Meet Up group needs an admin by Sept 25

[Jaime Glasser]

Hi!

I have received an email that HeatSync Labs Meet Up Group needs an admin. Do we want to continue as we did in the past post our meetings on Meet Up? Does anyone want to take it over? In the past those of us who sponsored recurring meetings made our Meet Up events and administrated those individually.

I think you just have to be a member of the Heat Sync Meet Up group to be listed as official administrator. It would be great if someone posted more Meet Ups and double checked that the Meet Ups are current with our calendar but usually individuals have taken care of it.


Should we continue? An administrator needs to take the group officially by Sept 25 if we want to keep it. I apologize I do not want to do it but will post the events I schedule in the future when returning to have them but I do not know when that will be.

Thanks!

Jaime

PS I think a number of people who routinely had Meet Ups scheduled have the password and could get it to any member that would like to sign up as official administrator.

[Gabriel Finke]

Hey Jamie, Thank you for bringing this up. I am the one who triggered the notification when I went to delete the account. I was told that If Heat Sync wants to continue to be a viable model then we need something like Meetup. We were having issues with the platform, it would send out notifications about canceled events like it was still happening. Let me know if you have any other platforms you would want to try for something like events at HSL.

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[Rafael]

So, the idea is to find an alternative to Meetups?

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[Jaime Glasser]

Thank you Gabe! I was torn because I think we did get some new people to HSL from Meetup especially the art ones because there are a lot of active art groups. I don’t know how many new people  Luis came to Coffee and Code from meetup? Or other repeating events in other areas? 

But, I too became very frustrated with the platform. At one time I was administrating a number of groups and they began to charge a lot and try to force you to collect money through their system which also cost fees. Most of what I offered was free, to being people to Downtown and HSL but not everything.

When you have a repeating event it is very easy to post them and the default is like indefinite. Deleting them is very difficult and needs to be done individually. You are also correct that it shows all the cancelled events and emails people way too much. 

It is cumbersome and a pain. 

What we will lose by letting our Meetup group expire is only the discussions (very old ) and some event photos.

Since we are not have my a full schedule yet of public events (the only ones where Meetup mattered) and I am not having any I think it would be fine to let it go.

Later if we wanted to RE-establish it we could.

FWIW.

(I think the number of people who came from meetup to my events was about the the same as people walking by? Maybe when I was having Meetups twice weekly then once weekly, and a potluck monthly and an Open House tied to other events there were maybe 5-10 people a month who may have heard about us through Meetup and came down. But there was also almost NO correlation between who said they were coming and who showed up! To stop this we were considering charging $5 for reservations at free events that were limited in attendance and then refund the $5 if they showed up!

I think finding another platform  and increasing Twitter and IG and Facebook activity if we have any public events is enough  especially until we have a full calendar again is fine.

Later when we (hopefully ) can return to unlimited public events we can just do some testing and keep track of where new people find out about HSL to see if it is worth it . 

On Sep 14, 2021, at 5:38 PM, Rafael <rafael...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Cprossu]

Yeah, we surely will have to look into it. I know though that I've interacted with around 7 people who ended up signing up for things and ended up stranded outside the lab with no one there, or no one knowing what went wrong, which is like the worst kind of advertising we could ever have!

That sort of experience stays with you and lingers, and that was why I joined the forces to rid ourselves of it for at least now.

Because we were so active, we only ran into these sorts of snags once in a while, but covid and post covid operations for the lab have brought the platform''s flaws to light at least as it stands.

I'm not sure what is all involved since it tied to a lot of different mobile platforms and apps, but my guess is there was really no thought given to cancelled events, or their hook/solution for it was not well tested/did not work. Either way they had plenty of time to figure out a solution, or at least come up with a workaround, and judging from what I found of their customer ratings and customer service, they have failed their users to do anything about the flaws and quirks of their system.

I do not think there is an easy solution to this, and I've not looked into many other platforms. I know CactusCon and some other events I have taken used eventbrite for their signups and meetings, so perhaps someone more well versed in these platforms can take a look and see if it can meet our needs.

[Nate Plamondon]

I agree that we need a platform like meetup, but as cpro said, it's brought us nothing but bad publicity for the past year. Yes, this should have been discussed among the board and probably here, but time was of the essence. We had a week where several people showed up to at least two events that had been canceled or made virtual months ago. Young Makers alone has lost several potential participants because they drove to the lab to find it closed.

They've made it clear through their actions since being acquired by WeWork that they're not interested in either fixing issues or supporting the platform, and their reviews reflect that. We're not the only group having these exact issues.

If we take it to a community vote, I'll be strongly on the "ditch meetup" side. This is definitely a service HSL needs, but we need to find a provider that will actually work for us.

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Nate Plamondon

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