At the OTS 5 years party we exchanged a few words about alternatives to Meetups.
While Meetup is not that bad both with the Coderdojo and OTS we face two main issues:
- It does not help to organize the mentoring.
- It’s well known among expats but very few locals (and otherwise migrants) are on meetup.
As it seems the only alternative is Facebook. There is a wider public in there, but the tool is even less adapted to our groups and I will not get into the other issues that make Facebook less than attractive for many of us.
In a discussion I’ve mentioned a platform which is being created here in Zurich:
It has been created with a goal that I think is close to the one behind OTS and:
- It currently only covers the “Swiss German market”
- It’s still being built.
Since starting this draft (it has been a long time) a new project has shown up: https://gettogether.community/ .
It’s less shaped for our needs – since they are copying meetup --, but we could get active there and see if we can ask them to add features that are useful for us (and maybe help them by fixing their easier bugs in our co-learnings)
Personally, I’ve been posting our meetins in openki for some time now and I’ve started also to put the in getTogether…
I got a few people discovering us through openki, but none yet (as far as I know) through getTogether…
If there is any interest, let’s start a discussion!