Oly Dem Meetup update

As you can see from the homemade link to the right, I’m already thinking about ditching meetup.com for all the fun they’ve been having raising rates and such. Yesterday I sent out an email to our more active Dem meetupers to guage their response to moving on from Meetup.com and becoming a lower case meetup

Date: Tue, 3 May 2005 10:08:20 -0700 (PDT)
From: “Emmett O’Connell”
Subject: Possible changes to our meetup

Hello everyone,

By now you probably recieved the announcment for this month’s meetup, including a short discussion on the changes that meeutp.com is making. Right now they are charging $9 a month for their service for meetup hosts, which in the past had been free. By 2006, they will raise that rate to $19 a month.

We are already raising $24/month for our room at the Olympia Center, and I feel $9 and eventually $19 a month for the service meetup provides is not worth it. I was wondering how everyone else feels about this.

I’ve talked to John Cusick with the county party and he feels ok using the TCD’s website (thurstondemocrats.org) to organize the meetups. We also have an existing yahoo group (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/olydemmeetup/) that has a lot of the same functions that meetup.com has.

So, there are option out there if we want to move away from meetup.com. What do you think?

Thanks,
Emmett

The replies I’ve gotten so far have been encouraging, so this time next week, we might be looking at officially ditching Meetup.com in Olympia.

Kari does a great job organizing what has been going on out there into a good post at politicsandtechnology.com, and he point us to a really good article on the entire meetup “kerfuffle” at the Personal Democracy Forum.

ALSO, next week, Tuesday, May 10, the Olympia Democratic Party meetup will be discussing Election Reform! With this weeks signing of several election reform bills by our Governor Chris, this should be an interesting one.