I am sad to say that I may soon be forced to resign in my position as the organizer of several local meetups. Not because I don't have faith in their growing, or in some cases, becoming something great, but because the owners of the Meetup.com company have decided to begin charging those who have been good enough to spend time and energy getting people out to events a monthly fee to stay on as organizers. They have given pathetic discounts to those who pay up right away, but the local communities effort to organize under one banner, one unified person in some of the more closely related groups have been shown to be a faulty one, as that just means that come early next year, one particular organizer will be on the hook for over $100 USD a month.
$100+ and the group is just growing to about 20 people. Are we to ask everyone to bring $5-10 to cover 'support' costs? It seems the new fees cover a lot of stuff that I and many of my fellow organizers do not need, nor want, but yet we cannot opt out of this, other than to resign, at which point the groups will whither and die away because people don't want to pay to meet other people in the same interest group, at least not locally. I am the organizer of the Fotolog, Warcraft, and DeviantArt meetup groups, none of which have ever had a successful meetup. I used to be the organizer for the weblog one too, but choose not to fight it when I was removed because no one had shown up in over a years worth of meetups. Meetup.com's future is in doubt.
I have a feeling that this month's Meeup in Montreal may be our last as well.
It's a shame. We've been doing this for almost 4 years now. I've met a lot of cool new folks I wouldn't have had a chance to meet otherwise.