Posted by Sheeri Cabral on May 13, 2009
In the wake of Meetup.com changing their sponsorship agreements, Technocation, Inc., an international not-for-profit group, has set up a fund for user group sponsorships. You can use the button below to donate any amount of money in US funds via PayPal:
(all monies sent through that button will be earmarked as a directed donation to the “User Group Fund”. In the interest of not cluttering up this blog post with a Donate button for each currency, you can use PayPal to send funds in *any* currency to “donate@technocation.org”. Just be sure to specify if you want the money to go to specifically to the User Group Fund.*)
Note that meetup.com’s fees are $144 per year ($12 per month).
Four years ago, MySQL and Meetup.com entered into an agreement. I have no idea of the details of this sponsorship, though from reading in between the lines, I believe the sponsorship was an in-kind sponsorship — that is, no money exchanged hands, but there were mutually agreed upon benefits. I have no idea what the benefits to Meetup.com were — publicity or free consulting, perhaps.
What I do know is that Meetup.com is changing the way they are doing sponsorships. Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Sheeri Cabral on May 4, 2009
The bad news is that whatever agreement MySQL AB had with Meetup.com has ended. As per the wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/How_to_create_a_user_group:
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
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!
Read the rest of this entry . . .
