RE: Meetup sadly quiet in Seattle

Nicole Brodeur sort of misses the point in her column this morning. Its not that online organizing (by youngsters even) is buying the farm, its just that its leaving meetup.com.

I wrote her an email:

Ms. Brodeur,

Great column this morning.

One thing you didn't pick up on is that meetup.com – which had been a free service all the way back to the Howard Dean meetups (which I attended down here in Olympia) – has recently become a pay service. This has been hard on politically themed meetups, which have started leaving meetup.com to develop their own online organizing tools.

For example, townhall.com and democracyforamerica.com, have gone there own way:

http://tools.democracyforamerica.com/link/
http://www.townhall.com/meetup/

Just because its not happening on meetup.com doesn't mean that online organizing isn't still going on. For example when meetup.com started charging, we in Olympia decided to move our meetup from their site onto our county Democrat website. Since the election, our group has evolved into a Democrat current events discussion/letter writing group, and in the last meeting, we even discussed dropping the term "meetup."

The hardest part about leaving meetup.com has been our drop in profile. Some people interested in getting involved would be more likely to find us at meetup.com than come to the county party website. I've advocated for the DNC to launch a free, meetup type tool for local communities, much like the efforts townhall.com and democracyforamerica.com.

Also, just wanted to add that I'm 29, so I fit the bill as a young organizer.

Thanks,
Emmett