Hi everyone.
My names Mihil and I’ve been learning Welsh for two months now. Having moved here for my PhD, I have really begun to enjoy Wales, Welsh culture and the Welsh people. I really enjoy leaning and believe it is so important for the country and the people here that more people, especially younger people learn it.
I was wondering if there is somebody here who can organise a meetup in Cardiff, and when I say meet up I mean on Meetups.com. This is a website some of you may be familiar with, where groups of people in a city or local area can co-ordinate social events. For example, I found out about meetups for drawing sessions through this website. I was wondering if somebody (head honcho, top dog, big wig etc) of the forum could create one for Welsh speakers/leaners in Cardiff.
There are meet ups for absolutely everything from board games, wine drinkers, hikers, runners etc…and I think it would be much easier to coordinate meetups for Welsh learners/speaker. This is something that would really appeal to myself and I’m sure many others in Cardiff.
Diolch yn fawr !
Mihil
Hi Mihil,
Great that you’re diving into learning Welsh! I’ll just flag this up to @ali who is one of the organisers of our monthly Cardiff meetups in the Mochyn Du. Perhaps she might like to include it on the website you mention to attract more people along. Thanks for flagging that up.
Wow. I wonder when they changed that? I’d always thought that we’d want to try and figure out a way to use an API if they run one, but if they’ve gone for charging the organisers, I guess that’s not going to fly. Pity.
Does the $10 a month allow you to set up as many meetups as you want, or is the number limited?
Right now, organizers may lead up to three Meetup groups on a single Organizer Subscription plan. If you start a second Meetup Group, or you step up to become the organizer of another existing Meetup group, you won’t be asked to pay again since your new Meetup group will be covered by your existing Organizer Subscription plan.
If you think you might want to run more than one Meetup group, you may want to consider appointing co-organizers or assistant organizers to help manage the additional responsibilities.
Which I’m reading as meaning that using an unlimited subscription ($15/month, 180$/year) we could post all our meetups on meetup.com by nominating a single organizer per meeting. That sounds a far better deal. Something to consider for a few months perhaps.
Er…? I’m reading that as meaning that we can have up to 3 groups for one subscription? Which is better, but still not ideal for as many groups as we have…
4 organizers each with 3 groups for the basic plan.
Unlimited organizers each with 3 groups for the unlimited plan.
Although the article I’ve linked to does explicitly talk about a “single organizer subscription” plan which isn’t one of the plan options listed on the pricing page
My guess there is that they think of their payment plans as ‘Organizer Subscriptions’, and when they say single, instead of meaning a plan for a single organiser, they mean ‘a single one of those plans’ - and that 3 is the most you can have per plan. It’s all vague enough to be guesswork, though, so thanks for getting in touch - the only way to be sure.
Shwmae @MihilPatel
We have a regular monthly meet in Cardiff every 1st Monday of each month. This is held at Y Mochyn Du in Sophia Gardens, near to the SWALEC Stadium. The next one will be tonight, and I will be there from 7pm onwards. It may be a quiet evening as our organiser Alison is on her holidays, as are some other regulars, but you’re more than welcome to come along if you’re free this evening.
To clarify, our ‘unlimited’ plan allows you to have up to 3 Meetup Groups and an unlimited number of co-organizers.
Since Meetup’s mission is to help bolster local community, each Meetup is linked to a specific zip code. Members find groups based on location, so it will make sense for you to have an individual Meetup Group for each city.
I rather suspected as much. Pity. It seems an odd bit of pricing, to be honest - I can imagine that there’s an entire sector of geographically-distributed organisations that would quite like to use MeetUp, but can’t on pricing grounds - reminds me of some of the stuff around EU VAT, where the government seems fixated on the idea that only big businesses are international, which is absurdly out of date. If MeetUp had a tier above their unlimited one which was genuinely unlimited - say £50 or £100 a month - I suspect they’d tap into a new layer of small-ish distributed businesses…
To be honest, I was a little suspicious at the suggestion of using a different website to organise meetups! The suggestion was very much “sold” or attempted to be. Ok, so there was no suggestion of a pricing structure, but it was enough to get us curious to look at the site.
I’m not saying this is a bad thing - fair play for trying (if my suspicion is correct). But in all honesty, who would pay for a service like that when you could do it on Facebook (for example - or Twitter, Clecs, Mentrau Iaith, and of course this very forum!) for absolutely nothing??
But… I could be wrong!
EDIT: I’m assuming that Mentrau Iaith advertises events/meetups for free - I haven’t checked this out if truth be told! So if anyone knows if they do or not…
To be fair, I think Meetup does, in principle, have its advantages. I joined it, ages ago (just as an ordinary non-paying member, not an organiser), and I did learn about quite a few things of potential interest in my general area. (I have a feeling it may not have charged at all at first - may be wrong about that).
People will only come to this forum once they know about SSiW; people will only follow things on Facebook or Twitter once they know about them. And Mentrau Iaith only works in Wales, I presume, whereas Meetup is all over the place.
Meetup is geographical location-based. When you sign up as a member, you indicate possible areas of interest (can be anything, not just languages), and how far you are prepared to travel, and then Meetup informs you of anything happening of interest to you, within the range you are prepared to travel.
I can see that it doesn’t quite map on to SSiW “meetups” though, as it is at the moment, although it probably could do with some tweaks, and sensible pricing.
