From: Arjen Lentz
Date: February 10 2009 11:52pm
Subject: Re: Dutch MySQL User group
List-Archive: http://lists.mysql.com/community/313
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Hi Sheeri, Walter,

On 10/02/2009, at 10:20 PM, Sheeri K. Cabral wrote:
>> Apart from the excellent links that Sheeri provided, note  
>> specifically that meetup.com is free for MySQL user groups.
>
> To be clear, MySQL pays the fee.  Follow the information in the  
> links provided to set it up.

To be even more clear ;-) it's an in-kind arrangement whereby  
Meetup.com gets a MySQL support subscription.
No money changes hands. It just a mutually beneficial -and luckily  
ongoing- deal between two nice parties; I used to just shuffle a few  
emails at renewal time to reconfirm, as the mysql support billing  
would inevitably send an expiration notice for the "contract" ;-)

Scott Heiferman (Meetup founder) and I arrived at this deal when  
Meetup.com moved to charge for meetups; quite a few MySQL groups  
actually went away the moment it happened, and that was most  
unfortunate. I was able to catch some of the groups and organisers,  
but not all.
At the time there were no mailing lists yet either, nor calendar  
integration; those were other key areas of concern, but Meetup did  
deliver on that too and it's been working fine. So, horay for Scott  
and his gang!

I do know that other countries aren't big Meetup users like the US and  
Australia, but it's still useful. The advantage in US/AU is that  
people are often member of multiple groups, and so using Meetup a)  
makes it easier for these peole to keep track of things and b) it's  
easier for an individual group to reach (potentially) interested people.
Such infrastructure is very handy. I participate in and/or co-organise  
MySQL and PHP groups here, but I'm also member of a "camping with the  
kids" group. Different! ;-)


>  You get calendar/signup stuff in there, as well as a mailing list  
> and other relevant infrastructure. Plus good Google juice.
>
> Yep!  It's nice not to have to maintain that, even though I could,  
> it's one less thing to deal with.  And when you're doing stuff as a  
> volunteer, that's one of the most important things!


Quite so.


Cheers,
Arjen.
-- 
Arjen Lentz, Director @ Open Query (http://openquery.com.au)
MySQL Training from $475/day, DBA/Support from $249/month

My blog is at http://arjen-lentz.livejournal.com
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