My problem with Meetup Groups

[slamhead]

Is it me or does it seem very difficult to get information to ALL meetup groups? Is there a central place to notify meetups of important information. For instance two of my meetup groups have forum type messages where one sends and email to everyone. Some of these people don't go read the forum type messages.

Is there a centralized place for all the meetup groups under Ron Paul to get messages out?

[Melissa]

yes it is the meetup alliance but they check what you want to go out before it sends to everyone and this is only for all the groups that have signed up for this but I think most have

[slamhead]

Seems silly to have things filter from the top down in a grassroots organization.

[Revolution9]

Seems silly to have things filter from the top down in a grassroots organization.

We would have morons emailing everybody for no good reason if there was not a filtering process.

HTH
Randy

[Ben Elliott]

We need a democratic resource for the latest information concerning the grassroots. A group of a few people shouldn't filter the information.

[WRellim]

Is it me or does it seem very difficult to get information to ALL meetup groups?

And I personally thank GOD for that limitation everyday.

Why? Because too many people have REALLY POOR JUDGMENT about what constitutes a message that is important enough for it to go out to "everyone."

Initially in my own group (as many other meetups) we had an "open" email where people could respond or send things to everyone... Recipe for DISASTER.

What you end up with is a 9/11 Truther sending out some piece of tripe, and then the consequential Flame War of a chat session conducted via everyone's email boxes... within a matter of DAYS everyone starts ignoring all the emails from the meetup (and then the organizers wonder and complain that "no one reads my emails" -- well maybe if there hadn't been 15 emails per day about Fox News excluding Ron Paul; then NOT excluding him; then calls for a boycott, etc.)

The official campaign has the ability to send emails to virtually ALL Ron Paul supporters across the entire nation -- and they use it only RARELY. Ask yourself WHY sometime.

BTW, I joined the Meeting Alliance and within DAYS it was being used to spam everyone with miscellaneous, ignorant stuff -- so I literally CLOSED any email from that system -- what COULD have been an important tool was made worthless by people's lack of restraint and judgment. Same thing has been true of nearly all of the purported "nationwide Organizer's groups" -- they all end up being used for idiotic spam.

So, YES, there could and probably should be a way to communicate with all the meetup group leaders -- but it would have to be in the hands of one or more COMPETENT individuals, and it would have to have message filtering that prevented 90% of the "junk" from being pushed through; and THAT would mean that a lot of people's "pet" projects wouldn't make the grade, and they would feel like their "toes" are being stepped on -- so the people running it would also need pretty thick skins.

[aknappjr]

I've been running the meetup alliance and have carefully filtered the emails.
We tried unfiltered, but people wouldn't follow the rules about only posting relevant posts and it would be too much work to remove the many abusers. We had people leaving the alliance. Anyway, communication is a problem with meetup that hopefully will be somewhat solved with the alliance when it goes into effect in the spring (its more of a limited-function prototype now).

[Mark Rushmore]

*Unproductive post; self-censored.*

[RobS]

Yeah, the spam is ridiculous. I am in four Meetups, only one of them causes a problem. Meetup 378 for the Lakeshore in Michigan. The same 3-4 people are constantly sending out emails about their latest blog post, where they are coming from, op-eds etc. Finally a bunch of us just sent an email saying to STOP. Hopefully it will.

There are things that NEED to get DONE... NOW! Like getting everyone signed up as precinct captain, canvassing, sign waving, etc etc.

Less talking, more doing.