Explore Meetup Groups or Discord events instead of the Google Calendar event for Community Hours

[timofurrer]

This issue is a follow up from the 2022-06-01 Community Hour where we've discussed options to migrate away from Google Calendar to improve a few current issues (like calendar updates, visibility who is joining, promotion, ...)

My suggestion would be to use a dedicated meetup.com group to schedule these events. We may also explore if we can somehow connect / reuse things from the other GitLab Meetup Events, like the Hackathon meetings, their Community Hours etc.

Another option would be to use Discord Events (@PatrickRice-KSC will try this out since it just came out).

However, for these reasons I'd prefer Meetup.com groups:

• it's a dedicated meetup platform and people may browse there for interests, like GitLab or Terraform
• we may be able to piggy bag on other Meetup activities from GitLab, like how they promote them or similar things (I'm not sure what the possibilities are there, but just a thought :))
• Easy calendar integration

@nagyv @armsnyder @PatrickRice-KSC @DonNicoJs @Shocktrooper WDYT?

[RicePatrick]

I like the idea of using a meetup.com group since gitlab already uses meetup, I wasn't aware of that! It also potentially allows people to find the event without being inside the discord server, as timo mentions.

I did demo creating an event within discord, and it does work well. You create the event, and it displays at the top of the discord server essentially as a pinned message. You can sign up, and the event takes place within a channel in discord (including audio and video):

However, there is one major piece missing that I think would create an undue admin burden: There are no recurring events, so we would have to schedule the next month's meetup each month. Similarly, people would have to sign up for the event each month.

[Shocktrooper]

Are there any existing plugins/bots that might sync a meetup.com event and a discord event? That way we can use both :)

[timofurrer]

Thanks for the experiment @PatrickRice-KSC. Given the information here I think it makes sense to just use meetup.com and pin a message to the Discord channel and start with that.

@nagyv @DonNicoJs what do you think about this?

[nagyv]

@timofurrer @PatrickRice-KSC @Shocktrooper Thanks for opening the issue and looking into the possibilities with Discord. I like the idea of a meetup.com event. I'll reach out to the people who manage https://www.meetup.com/gitlab-virtual-meetups/ to add the Terraform community hour there.

[nagyv]

@timofurrer FYI, I re-assigned this issue to myself.

[ItsMissMie]

@nagyv Thank you for creating this issue. Are you a member of the GitLab Virtual Events meetup group? I will add you as a co-organizer which will give you access to posting your office hours. Also, check out this handbook page to post events to the GitLab events page as well.

[nagyv]

@ItsMissMie can you add me using my personal Meetup account or shall I register with the GitLab e-mail? I'm a member of the group with my personal account.