Why we are leaving Meetup.com and upcoming This is HCD Ireland event with Gerry McGovern & Ulla Devitt

Key links

• Sign up to our newsletter: https://www.thisishcd.com/community/stay-up-to-date-with-this-is-hcd
• This is HCD / Ireland event with Gerry McGovern and Ulla Devitt on November 11 - https://www.meetup.com/thisishcd-ireland-chapter/
• This is HCD / Sydney event with Luke Craven on November 17 - https://www.meetup.com/this-is-HCD-sydney/events/280736773/
• Join the Slack HCD Group: https://www.thisishcd.com/community/slack-community

Transcript

Hey folks and welcome to another episode of Global Voices the podcast dedicated to the wonderful chapters of This is HCD around the world.

Today on the show we have a few things to chat about.

So, there's been some updates from chapters, and we have an event happening this coming week in Ireland, and will be hearing from Sarah, our brilliant chapter Lead shortly.

We will also include the event in Australia on November 17 again with Ines and Luke Craven which is a brilliant event - and replay the message from the last episode

First up.

Slack Channel

We had a few teething issues around self-on boarding  to the Slack channel over the last week and that has been resolved now (hopefully)!

As we move away from Meetup on Jan 1, we want to create more community level conversation within our Slack. A few people asked why we are leaving Meetup. Well there are a few reasons - I will cover off.

1. In my option, Meetup is a bad system for Community leaders to host with. The system itself is really clunky, poorly designed, and they never want you to leave. In fact once my credit card didn’t go through, around the time I was leaving Australia. Without knowing this, they offered one of the communities to the first person on the list. Who could have taken the community that I had been paying for and I would have lost it. Meetup didn’t care about this as this was their process. So you can’t really LEAVE or close the community
2. They do nothing to encourage community interaction. All it is is a database with people. We want to do more in this space, and Meetup is not the right place for us to do this.
3. We have a Pro Level Mailchimp account, and Slack channel and figure we can do this better - with a little more work. So hope people will move over and follow us off Meetup. It might not be perfect, but it gets us closer than working with Meetup

Back in the day, when I was a musician and working for Myspace - I saw businesses pour millions and millions of dollars into their Myspace communities. I saw bands and musicians delete their websites and replay the narrative that you don’t need a website anymore, myspace does it all and better. This was probably true at the time for some. But what happened when a big corporate like News bought the website, and ran it into the ground? All that effort of building communities just floated away. I don’t want that for the This is HCD Community system. We would rather own and have better control how we work, and use platforms that are agnostic.

So going back to Slack - in the show notes now, you can join up. Join one of the channels in your timezone, like UK, Ireland, Sydney, Berlin, Melbourne, Cameroon etc. If you know of other people in your area who might be interested, invite them along too. We want to create a two level community - at a Global Level and at a Community level.

Melbourne
Event happening soon too - and will have more in the next episode.

UK event

In other news, we are edging closer to our first event in This is HCD UK. Be first in line by signing up to our newsletter (link in the show notes)

Ireland

Let’s listen to the event in Ireland happening this week

It’s with the one and only, Gerry McGovern, host of World Wide Waste Podcast and creator of the wonderful Top Tasks method - Gerry works with us at This is Doing too and recently spoke at the last Doing Design Festival in June with Ulla Devitt from Ireland Health Department (HSE) - it was one of the highlights of the day and we are excited for them to give a talk at This is HCD Ireland

Sydney - November 17th

Let’s take a listen to Inez in Sydney about the upcoming event with Luke Craven.

So that’s all for this episode - if you have any questions, please hit me up on Slack @gerry - or via email if you’re not part of the community at gerry@thisishcd.com

Chat to you all soon

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