Meetup.com Confirms Automatic MySQL Sponsorship Ended
May 4, 2009 / By Sheeri Cabral
The bad news is that whatever agreement MySQL AB had with Meetup.com has ended.
MySQL AB has an agreement in place with meetup.com to cover the organizer fees. Simply click at the link at the top of the meetup.com page to request your electronic voucher so you can become an organizer.
Unfortunately, this agreement has ended, so there’s going to have to be a more manual process to get MySQL to sponsor the meetup groups. At its cheapest, a year of meetup.com is $144.
The good news is that Giuseppe and Dups (as well as the local Sun/MySQL folks in Boston who also sponsor the pizza and soda we have) have expressed that they are dedicated to sponsoring these user groups, so nobody has to go around digging for spare change just yet.
Here’s the sad e-mail I received:
from Meetup Support <support@meetup.com>
to sheeri
date Mon, May 4, 2009 at 5:52 PM
subject Greetings from Meetup Support (KMM1797374I15977L0KM)
mailed-by meetup.com
Hello Sheeri,
Thanks for your patience while we looked into this!
I did some research and My SQL will no longer be sponsoring Meetup
Groups. Therefore, you’ll need to purchase a subscription plan in order
to continue hosting the Group on Meetup.com. Sorry about that!
There are 3 price plans available:
$12 a month for 6 months (a single $72 charge)
$15 a month for 3 months (a single $45 charge)
$19 per month
Each plan has a 30-day money back guarantee. Organizers can run up to 3
Meetup groups with their subscription.
You can view and update your subscription plan from here:
http://www.meetup.com/account/subscription/
If you have any other questions, please let me know.
Sincerely,
Antonio Ortiz
Meetup Support Specialist
Meetup HQ
1048909 is your incident number. Please do not remove this number from
the message.
After facilitating the Minnesota MySQL Meetup Group for 4-1/2 years, and not having “Meetup Support Specialist” Mr. Ortiz return my inquiries to MySQL, this is just lame. He has a position for a program that no longer exists? The writing is on the wall, and I hope that the Sun execs have beautifully colored parachutes!
this explains why i was suddenly asked to pay for my meetup. thanks!
Excuse, my misinformed previous rant. Mr. Ortiz was clear on the Meetup side. Sun/MySQL has not been clear, that has confused and bothered some (like me), but here is some info I have finally gotten from them:
There will be an announcement made early next week, but as a heads-up this is more of an issue with meetups.com not MySQL/Sun or Oracle. We have been working with another vendor around meetups and you will see something early next week that I believe will be a good thing. (sent May 8, 2009)
Kathy Guzman
Sr. Account Manager
MySQL/Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Pingback: MySQL User Groups : migrating event management to Facebook - Technology
MySQL User Groups are now encouraged to move their organizational side to Facebook.
http://blogs.sun.com/MySQL/entry/mysql_user_groups_migrating_event
As one of the Meetup organizers who brought this to the attention of MySQL, or at least tried, it’s good to see that something has happened to offer some explanation and some advice. Thanks to Sheeri for paying attention, and thanks to Dups for dealing with it. Still, it feels like this was just tossed this back to organizers to fix. Maybe Community Relations could just use the name PlanetMySQL to describe their activities.
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