Meetup wastes no time, and doesn’t give me a chance to explain anything before sending out notices to everyone in the Philly WordPress group telling them that they have no organizer. Just another failure in the whole Meetup system. So what’s the story?
Here it is, plain and simple: I’m tired of breaking my Saturday in half, showing up at the meetup at 2pm, having two other people there who only want to talk about how great WordPress.com is (something about which I have very little interest, and a mild distaste for), and finally having everyone who I would have hoped to see at 2pm for WordPress trickle in for the 3pm blogger meetup, whose activities are really what I want to get out of this meetup in the first place.
And then, the first month I miss the meetup as a result of unplanned work excess (something that already has me stressed out), the place we hold the meetup (which never did have wi-fi) apparently has some kind of event. As a result, I get a bunch of emails from angry meetup people saying, “Gee, thanks for letting me drive 2 hours to a locked restaurant for a meetup that didn’t happen.”
Ja, up at the New York WP meetup has some good ideas about getting his meetup organized. He actually gets an agenda together of things to talk about. Maybe if I did that, people with interest in WordPress (and not WordPress.com) would show up.
And it ticks me off when someone like Lorelle comes in and “organizes” things without having run an actual meetup every month for two years – dealt with the people, tried to keep up enthusiasm, managed the group itself, put up with the crap, and personally paid all the dues during that time. Walk a mile. No, it’s not very hard work, and you don’t have to be appreciative, just don’t front, that’s what I’m saying. Don’t front.
I set myself a goal of changing United WordPress Meetup Day to the third saturday of the month. Well, that didn’t work out. Just another broken aspect of Meetup.com. There are more active members in the Philly meetup group for WP than in any other group in the world. Our meetups met every month. Every month. And everyone got to talk and listen – it wasn’t just a pulpit for “walking in unison”, to use a Stargate SG-1 reference.
Let’s look at this pragmatically. I don’t live in Philadelphia. Organizing a meetup pretty much means that I am expected to attend every meetup. So I have to make the 1-2 hour drive through traffic once a month (both ways) to keep the group going. There is no “month off” apparently, as this month has shown.
I could go on at quite some length with reasons why I just don’t care to be involved with WordPress any more at all, but I’m not quite ready to write that post yet. Still, here’s the crazy part - I am still involved with WordPress. I deal with WordPress every day for my job. Just because everyone isn’t reaping the benefits of my coding doesn’t mean I’m not working with WP. Nobody was paying me to support those free plugins, even though I never asked, and now that I work on this stuff every day for clients, I just don’t have time for maintaining everything that I’d want to the level that it requires. (Especially as the API changes out from under me every 90 days. Or so I thought.)
Pretty much, I got an angry email this afternoon, and thinking through all of the above, I found myself wondering why I even do this? So at the end of about 30 seconds of my angry fit, I found the controls to dislodge myself from the maw of this beast and did so.
While I would love to talk more in person about my passion for Habari, get more people involved with Habari, and expound on the virtues of Habari over WordPress (which all of my work projects will start using as soon as it is robust enough, in which case I will be paid or my open-source work), that is not the reason for stepping down as the meetup organizer.
I’m simply not getting what I want for myself out of the meetup.
The only real shame about stepping down as organizer is that I have a lifetime coupon for half-price meetup dues. If I don’t organize any meetups, then I assume that goes away when I stop paying fees. Still, we could all do with a break from the commercialism Meetup.com puts up around our hobby.
So what’s next?
Colin suggested that we do something besides a WordPress meetup. A more directed, “BarCamp”-style gathering where actual coding might take place. I’m down with that. I need to look into it some more and see what is involved in organizing such a thing. Perhaps actually find a location with wi-fi. I’m even cool with spending some money ($300 or so?) to get a nice place if it’s not every month. It’s certainly not going to be as regular as these monthly meetups (why does Meetup.com insist on monthly anyway?) but hopefully something that people will want to do more than once.
In the meantime, I will be attending the Philly Blogger meetup at my leisure, and if Scott needs a co-organizer, I’d be happy to help out reserving the venue and filling in when he’s off at some crazy Apple event.
In closing, I wouldn’t have traded my experience with the WordPress meetup group for anything. I’ve met so many cool people who have the same blogging interests as me, but still have very different, interesting points of view on how to use that forum. I hope that I’ll still see you all at the regular blogger meetups.
