Meetup is on a mission to help the world’s people self-organize into local groups.
Meetup.com is an online service that helps its users find others with similar interests. The primary purpose is to find others near you with similar interests so that you can all meet in person, typically in a public place such as a local restaurant or a meeting hall. However, Meetup.com has a secondary purpose of helping users find others of similar interests anywhere in the country or even anywhere in the world. The online service provides message boards and other features to allow for interaction, even when the participants are located thousands of miles apart.
A Meetup Group might be dedicated to genealogy or food or your child's school's PTA group or local badminton players or jazz music or greyhound dog owners or various political ideas or most any other personal interest imaginable. I searched on the word "genealogy" and found the Genealogical Society of Hispanic America, an African-American Genealogy Group, the Tennessee Valley Genealogy Group, the Vancouver Genealogy Meetup, the Caribbean Genealogical Research Meetup Group, the New York People Of Color Genealogy Meetup Group, the Irish / British Genealogy Group, the Tokyo DAR Meetup Group, the Siletz Tribal Member Network (for members of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians), the Niagara Frontier Civil War Round Table, and quite a few others. Leaving the world of genealogy, I also found local groups near me of cribbage players, a local knitting and needlework group, a group of mothers who work together to form a local play area for pre-schoolers, a residents' group of a local condo association, a triathlon group, a Latin and ballroom dancing group, and many others. Meetup.com presently has more than 58,000 groups.
Again, the online space provides a method of finding others, but most of these groups also schedule face-to-face meetings. Meetings are typically held in public places, such as at restaurants or at a local Elks Hall or similar places.
Meetup.com is a great way of finding others who share your interests. You often can find such people in your local area and schedule meetings of the group. I found genealogy groups on Meetup.com as well as many other personal interests.
The online service averages 296 new Meetup Groups forming per hour! So far, more than 6.5 million people have signed up and formed over 60,000 local Meetup Groups. The service reports that its members schedule an average of 179,000 face-to-face meetings per month.
Joining Meetup.com is free of charge. Joining an existing group may or may not require payment. Some groups have dues for joining; other groups have dues per event; still other groups are free. After all, sometimes someone has to pay for the meeting hall. Creating a new group does require payment of a fee, typically $12 to $19 a month. Those fees appear to be the sole source of revenue for Meetup.com; I saw no advertising on the site.
You can learn more at http://www.meetup.com.
