Thank you for all your feedback and passionate response. We read every post, take the issues you raise to heart, and are hard at work on improvements. I know that the passion in your response comes from the fact that you love your Meetups, you are personally vested in them and worry about how the changes will affect them.

WHAT TO EXPECT
For those of you who are angered by the changes that we announced last Monday and rolled out Thursday, I suspect that nothing I could post here would make you feel less angry (short of saying that we are going to revert back). While we will not fully revert, I'm posting this message here to give you a sense for what to expect. And I owe you some insight into why we do what we do.

After any change, we carefully look at the feedback, and most importantly, the impact on Meetups. Then we make adjustments. There are things we got right last week and some things we got wrong. Over the weekend, our team has been assessing the feedback and stats and will soon start rolling out improvements based on the feedback. You can see some of what's coming here. http://www.meetup.com...


WHY WE DO WHAT WE DO
We don't change Meetup for the sake of change. Frankly, we'd prefer to "take it easy" and not do the hard work of changing Meetup. We only change Meetup because we want change the world. We see how your Meetups help people, and we really believe that the world would be a better place if there were Meetups Everywhere about Most Everything. Everyone in the future should have access to a friendly, welcoming, powerful local community about whatever is important to them. If you are a Meetup Organizer, and you've had people thank you for what you do, then you know the potential of meetups. We've got a long way to go, so we can't stand still.

That's our mission, so that's what drives what we do.


RUMORS
I'd also like to address the many rumors swirling around, and set the record straight:

1) We love Organizers. And not just because they keep Meetup sustainable/profitable (thank you). Few organizations on earth champion the power of Organizers and local community more than we do. We are not trying to wrestle control of Meetups from Organizers. That being said, we do not believe in the "lone-ranger" model of organizing. Organizing is hard work, it is often thankless, and it is easy to burnout. Over the last few years we've taken more steps to enable Organizers to involve more people in the building of a community. We added Co-orgs, AOs, Event Organizers, etc, and we added the Ideas section. Last week's changes are intended to enable Organizers to involve members in planning more easily. Organizers tell me all the time that they want help finding places to meetup, coming up with quality meetup ideas, but have trouble getting enough people to agree to be AO's. The new functionality gives Organizers the option to allow people to contribute more actively. There are legitimate concerns about of spam and other risks of openness, and they will continually be addressed, but we started Meetup with a belief that "people are generally good", and it has served us well so far.

2) Organizers can turn off the ability for members to schedule Meetups.

3) We are listening. The fact that less than 2% of Organizers have posted here, does not make us value the feedback any less. We take feedback seriously regardless of who the idea/feedback comes from and how many people weigh in. We want to understand what impacts you and your Meetups positively and negatively so we can help make it better.

4) We are definitely not sinking. In fact, we are growing fast, and the Meetup "ecosystem" is doing well since the changes. This includes the number of new Meetups being scheduled -- and new Meetup Groups getting started. And today (1/31/11) might be our very first 100,000 RSVP day (or close to it)!! [This is not for public consumption, but check this out: http://meetup.github.... (it may require Chrome or Safari browser).]

5) Privacy did not change. Google Maps reflect the exact location of a Meetup only to people who previously could see it. If you are seeing specific examples where this is not so, please let us know.

6) We are not getting paid by Google for use of their maps. We did not make any change to serve anyone but the people. We are not trying to maximize revenue, we are trying to maximize Meetups (and the people who show up at them).

7) There is no secret agenda. We don't hide our intentions. I'm probably too "public" (on Twitter & elsewhere) about my excitement about the potential for everyone's Meetups in the future.


Despite our best intentions, we did not get everything right here for everyone. But we did take a big leap forward here. We will continue to hear feedback and make enhancements. We encourage you to give it try, let us know what works for you (and why) and what doesn't work for you (and why) as we go.

Thank you for your passion & patience & willingness to try what's new,
Heif
Chief Organizer