Boulder, Colorado Haskell meetup – tonight!

Events
#1

The Boulder Haskell Programmers group has been dormant since before COVID. I’m trying to revive it. Tonight’s event is largely organizational, but I expect to have more on a monthly cadence, like we once did. I don’t expect anyone reading this now to be able to make it, but I welcome feedback either here, on the group page, or via email about anyone’s interest, times they could attend, suggestions for content, etc.

The group has moved from Meetup to a new home using Mobilizon: Boulder Haskell Programmers

Tonight’s event is 17:00–19:00 upstairs at the main Boulder Library branch, more details at Rebooting - Mobilizon

Thanks!

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#2

Cool, good luck! We’re trying to revive the Helsinki group as well, and also thinking of moving off of Meetup. I’ll be interested to hear how Mobilizon works for you!

#3

My local is also on Meetup, and I’m also interested in alternatives.

#4

The event last night was small, but fun. I definitely have some thoughts about Meetup vs Mobilizon now.

First, one mistake I made is to have no transition window. I announced to the group that I would move it to Mobilizon on the last day before my Meetup organizer subscription ended. We should have had at least some overlap where meetings were posted in both places, so the existing membership could migrate. There were a number of factors affecting attendance, I’m sure, but that certainly had an impact.

One of the attendees is paying for organizer status on Meetup for other groups, and he’s going to adopt the Haskell group so we can have a better transition.

I’m still quite new to Mobilizon, so I’m sure there’s more to figure out, but I do like it. However, it’s still buggy and feature-poor in some ways. E.g., (and there is a small chance that this was an accident on my part, but I don’t think so) I scheduled the event weeks ago, but after the US DST change the event time was listed an hour later than I planned. I only noticed like 30 minutes before the event, which led to confusion & delays. When I edited the event to fix that, the event lost its header image. These are annoyances, but there is also code on GitLab for Mobilizon so I can report and/or fix these things. My instance also isn’t on the latest version of Mobilizon, and I suspect at least one of those issues has already been fixed.

It has some features that I don’t recall whether Meetup.com does

  • standard fields for accessibility of the event (wheelchair, sign language, subtitles, non-smoking, etc.) as well as some integrations with online ticketing, event schedules, pricing, etc.)
  • it allows “anonymous” participants, who can register for an event without having a Mobilizon account (although we did run into an issue where it’s difficult or at least unclear for anonymous attendees to cancel their registration)
  • it’s federated, so you can follow the group on Mastodon, events are posts and comments on events are replies to that post

The biggest thing, though, is just the size of the existing Meetup userbase – do what you can to smooth that transition for everyone, and announce in places like this (preferably before day-of) to try to get the new membership up before you cut off Meetup.

3 Likes
#5

Thanks for the writeup! I’ve been considering trying to revive the London Haskell group when I’ve got some time off next month and I’d been wondering about Meetup alternatives. Mobilizon looks like a cool option, even if it’s something I’d avoid for now for a less technical audience due to the glitches.

#6

Reviving London Haskell would be so cool!

#7

Yeah, a few people have mentioned it, e.g. on Reddit a year ago, and again more recently, and I was waiting in the hope that someone else would get the ball rolling. Especially since I never actually attended the pre-pandemic meetups, as I moved to London in 2021. But it now looks less likely that the old group is going to be revived as such.

I was thinking of maybe just booking out a small room in a pub somewhere central, and polling whoever turns up on what sort of events they’d like to do going forward.

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#8

Just as an anecdote for people thinking to revive Meetups: the Helsinki meetup has 500+ people, and I would guess no more than 10% of them are actually active. Whether or not they’re even still in Helsinki is uncertain after a couple years of world turbulence :slight_smile:

1 Like
#9

I’ve created London Haskell to get the ball rolling.

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