I agree with Alex and Paul here. It would be ideal to say "Oh we can replicate the functionality of a user calendar"- that's absolutely true. The discovery functionality is what's not replicatable.
I've had one user here in NYC who does not wish to participate on the meetup because he doesn't want to sign up, but wanted to be kept informed about events and discussion. At this time, there's an ical feed for events, and an RSS/Atom feed for the mailing list. This doesn't allow for full participation, but it allows anyone who doesn't want to sign up to Meetup to be kept informed of the events. Additionally, a third party could collect all the ical feeds and construct a calendar. This is not ideal, but neither is Facebook, or Google, or any other third party service, and it's a lot better than the alternatives. - Serge On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 6:27 PM, Alex Barth <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 3:25 PM, Clifford Snow <[email protected]> > wrote: >> >> However the cost is expensive for individuals to start a Meetup group. > > > I recommend either crowd funding a meetup group or getting a local company > to sponsor. Like Ian said, at OSM US we've spent quite some cycles on how we > could support local communities US-wide with paying meetup.com fees but no > matter how you turn it you're looking at a non-neglectible administrative > overhead to manage this plus the very real possibility of paying for meetup > groups that have gone inactive. Funding locally is the most organic and > effective approach. > > Funding locally is also a great opportunity to create an active trust of > meetup hosts or involve a local company in OSM :-) > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Talk-us mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us > _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
