Hi everyone,

I think most of you are aware that we’ve launched a Meetup Pro account so we could take on the cost of Meetup from the local organizers. We currently have 16 official User Groups on the page.

As of the third week of April, the groups.openstack.org portal will be discontinued. We’d like to take this opportunity to start an initiative to move all User Groups over to the Meetup Pro account for a single point of truth. This will increase discoverability for groups, and help us better support community growth.

In light of the feedback we’ve received from you all, we’ll encourage groups to have at least 4 meetups per year (one meetup per quarter) going forward as a minimum requirement for being in the Meetup Pro network. 

However, we realize that circumstances that might prevent you from having meetups happen. In that case, please feel free to reach out directly to me. We really want to work with you all to make sure our community is supported so it can continue growing.

User Group 6 Month Trial
We’ll be offering a 6 month trial period, where the Foundation will temporarily sponsor groups to be on the Pro account (which costs USD $15/month per group). We’ve previously required groups to have at least 5-6 meetups per year in order to be funded, but If the group has at least 2 independent meetups during this 6 month period, we will continue funding the group to be a part of the official network. If groups fail to host meetups, and do not contact me, the funding will be discontinued and it won’t be visible on the Foundation’s official community network.

Next Steps
If you are the main organizer of your group, email me (ashlee@openstack.org), and I’ll send a link to connect your Meetup account to our Foundation Meetup Pro network. If you don’t have a Meetup account, and you do not wish to use Meetup.com, please send me the link to your group’s page, or let me know how you coordinate meetups.

Thanks so much for your patience as we make this move! Reach out to me if you have any questions. 

Ashlee


Ashlee Ferguson
OpenStack Foundation
ashlee@openstack.org