Meetup HQ Blog

From the Meetups I wish I'd attended Archive...

The Greater Denver Urban Homesteading Group is awesome. At their Meetups, members learn how to can vegetables and bake bread and take care of bees...You know, skills that some folks' great-grandparents used to know how to do, but that most folks nowadays don't.

One of the Greater Denver Homesteading Group's recent Meetups caught my eye:

Cheesemaking 101: Making Farmhouse Cheddar

Super exciting. Making cheese! That's awesome.

But I think my favorite part about this Meetup is the spirit of sharing knowledge and skills with others that clearly comes through in the description from the Meetup's Organizer, Everett:

I am by no means a cheese making expert. If one of you are, then I invite you to teach instead of me. ;-) But I have successfully made mozzarella several times, and have made three great wheels of cheddar and one really bad wheel of cheddar (I didn't let it dry enough before sealing in wax). I still have to look at the book while I'm working, but I get better every time.

You don't need to be an expert to be an Organizer. You just have to be willing to take the time and energy to share your passions with others.

And in this case, the cheese wheel they created? Everett brought it to the Group Picnic a few weeks later to share with the rest of the Meetup Group.

Hey everyone!

The page where Organizers schedule their Meetups is an essential page on the site, on which you choose from dozens of Meetup's event-related features. But it's also perhaps our most complicated page (and slowest to load), and can be overwhelming to new Organizers. So we've streamlined the whole page. We've found through feedback and testing that it's now generally clearer and easier to use. We also optimized our code to make the page load faster.

The features on the page are now grouped into clear sections, each of which you can collapse or expand. With the sections collapsed, it's easier to scan the page and see the different parts quickly. If you prefer all the sections expanded, click on "Expand all" - and you can even save your preference for the page to always be expanded.

We fixed up a few other related things as well, based on your requests:

• Easy button to add photos into the event description.
• Higher character limits for the description and "How will members find you there?"
• Formatting in your description (colors, etc) now carries over when you click through to email your Meetup Group.
• Fixed some missing data issues when you go back and edit a Meetup.

Let us know your feedback, and look for more features relating to scheduling Meetups coming soon!

Thanks,
Jesse

Most conference booths are lame. Why else would they bribe you with schwag just to come by?

So when we were given a booth space at Personal Democracy Forum (we are a sponsor of the conference), we decided to have some fun with it.

We chucked the usual table and created a meeting space at the conference. Then we invited a handful of Meetup Organizers related to the conference to tell their stories and promote their Meetup Group.

Why? Because we are a platform for great local Groups. That means showcasing great local Groups whenever we can. If you are at the conference, come by the space and follow Meetup on Twitter to see who is presenting when.

If this works we will do it again in the future. If you are interested in getting involved in future conferences, let us know! Just email us at organizer@ meetup.com. We'll look forward to hearing from you.

As we mentioned, we recently stopped restricting our launches to Tuesday mornings. Check out this great new feature:

Tag people in photos
Group members can now identify people in their Meetup photos and "tag" them. This means that when a group member views a group photo with people in it, they'll hopefully identify the people in the photo and put names to faces.

Other online-only social networks have similar functionality, but we think that due to our focus on real world face-to-face interaction, this functionality is even more powerful here on Meetup. What better way is there to see who goes to the Meetups and to tie together the online and offline?

You can find this feature by looking at any photo in your Photos section, and clicking on the "Tag this photo" link to the right of the photos. This feature is limited to group members. Those tagged will get an email notification telling them they have been tagged. And of course, they will be able to untag themselves if they desire.

We'd like to give a warm welcome to the newest edition to the Meetup staff... Marlowe!

Marlowe joined us for Take Your Dog to Work Day, and he did an excellent job coding, manning the phones, and spreading good cheer. 

Marlowe's proud father is our very own Gary, who was right beside his pooch checking all the p's and SQL's.

It looks like many of you out there made notes on Group calendars about Take Your Dog to Work Day.  If you post pictures to your Group photo album, let us know!

This week, join guest interviewer Shavanna as she turns the tables on famed Meetup blogger Davide Gualandi.

First things first. You work for Meetup.com, where you have a very nice L-shaped desk. What are you typing at your computer and how long have your digits been punching on that keyboard?
I mostly write love letters to Organizers and Members of the Meetup community, both in English and Italian (the Official Language of Love). I also speak with them on the phone, listening to their stories and sharing my knowledge of the website with them. I love them and most of the time, they love me back. On a weekly basis, I also translate new features from English to Italian, so that people in my country of origin can use the cool stuff we release.

You've been in the states for about five years now, with time spent in San Francisco, some town whose name escapes me in Massachusetts, and now here in New York City. Why do you love America so much, and how is it they keep giving you a visa to stay here?
Well... I moved to America because I fell in love with San Francisco when I visited back in 2002. I moved there in 2004 and spent two years by Alamo Square. After that, I think I decided to stay because this country has somehow allowed me to change things around in my life quite easily. America is not that hard to navigate, nor that complex... it's pretty straightforward and fairly pragmatic for the most part. I'd say Europe is more self-asserted and self-referential - kinda stuck in its own ways. Europeans take a lot of pride in keeping up those old ways. Hopefully one day I'll have a piece of paper that allows me to switch in between continents with no hassle.

Recently, an interview you did with Dirty Projectors was the cover story on Blow Up, an Italian music magazine. Of course, you also have this long-running series on the Meetup HQ Blog. How long have you been such a successful interviewer, and how does the fame not get to your head?
I've been a music writer since I was seventeen. I've written about this Brooklyn band Dirty Projectors a few times before. Their new album was quite hyped, so my interview ended up taking the cover. Regarding fame... well, I've been doing this for many years, so my only pleasure is to turn readers on to obscure music. I write mostly about really weird acts, so I have very limited stories about sitting backstage inebriated or trashing hotel rooms.

You grew up in Modena, Italy, but you're a vegetarian. It would be difficult for you to care less about soccer matches, and the most you wolf-whistle at is a nice Engineered Garments button-down. What other things make you a non-stereotypical-Italian?
I know. I really fail as an Italian. My favorite food is Indian or Thai, I'm always early when it comes to appointments or meeting people, I used to despise Invicta backpacks when they were in fashion, I prefer a White Chocolate Mocha to the best Espresso, I have no flirting skills, no charm, no interest in cars (I've never even had a driver's license)... That said, there's definitely an Italy that I relate to, although I understand my relationship with it is mostly based on nostalgia. I'll redeem myself by saying that I crave Italian pizza whenever I consume your greasy American slices.

When we used to sit in the International Room together, you'd often regale us with original songs about various Meetup-related things. You also had a phase where you were in a punk metal band as a youth. What role did you play in that band, and how has it influenced your later lyrical work here at Meetup? Can you give us an example of one of your more popular Meetup ditties?
I like singing songs about the office and making people laugh. It's my own kind of folk songwriting, you know? I'm like Meetup's very own Daniel Johnston. My taste in music has changed a lot throughout the years, but yes, I played guitar in a hardcore band in my late teens. I don't think there's any correlation between that and my talent in crafting a beautiful tune about sandwiches and people's habits in the office. Since this skill surfaces spontaneously, I cannot gift you an example right now... but I'll take commissions from Organizers if they want a song about their group.

Every few months, we invite a few Organizers to come in and share their stories with us Meetup HQ'ers. We get to ask them questions, hear about their experiences, and find out what inspires them.

Hearing directly from Organizers helps motivate us as we do the things we do everyday.

It's so great that we'd love for everyone to be able to join us, but we can't fit that many people in the office.

So we're trying a little experiment:

Friday June 26th from 12:30 to 2pm ET, we're doing a live webcast from Meetup HQ!

We'll set up a camera, video the Organizers, and broadcast it live on the web. If all goes well.

Want to join us? Just check us out at http://www.justin.tv/meetuptv

Join us tomorrow at 12:30pm as we hear from some excellent Organizers! It should be great.

If you have a question that you would like to ask the Organizers in the HQ office, feel free to chat with some of us on Justin.TV and we’ll try and get your questions answered.

We look forward to having you join us tomorrow!

You may have noticed Emeline here on the Meetup HQ Blog talking about hikers or her Mom, or maybe you spotted her name at the bottom of an email back from Meetup Support.

She's a superstar here at Meetup HQ: helpful, funny, and really committed to helping Organizers put together rocking Meetups.

But what some people don't know is that in addition to rocking at her day job, Emeline is also a really fantastic dancer and choreographer. 

We spotted Emeline and some of her students in a recent article in the Hudson Reporter, along with Birnur, the Organizer of the Jersey City ~ Hoboken Bellydance Meetup. (Congrats Birnur!)

Wanna catch some of Emeline's choreography? Those are her students dancing in the video at the top of the article.

In just a few days, Emeline's heading off to Cairo to study Middle Eastern dance, percussion and Arabic!

She'll be working remotely from Egypt until the fall, and we'll miss her. But she's promised to keep us posted on what she's up to. So keep an eye on on the blog for tales of Emeline's adventures!

We have some very exciting news!

So that we can bring you new features, enhancements and bug fixes faster, we're discontinuing our weekly Tuesday morning releases.

Instead, we've set ourselves up to be able to launch whenever we have something ready to go live.

This means we should be able to launch daily (or multiple times per day) if necessary.

More good news - we won't have to take the site down to do these launches.

Over the past month, we have been working to speed up the time it takes to launch changes, while at the same time being able to do launches with the site still running. In fact, the past few Tuesday morning launches have actually had no down time!

We're excited because we can get the stuff we're working on out to you faster and better tested. We hope you're excited, too!

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