I think @sannah82 explained our idea well: meetings can have a limited number of places for whatever reason, but those places should not be filled up with the organizer’s friends before the meeting is even open. Or, a meeting shouldn’t be only for the people who are in a certain Whatsapp group, for instance.
We should give everyone in the community the same chance to join the gathering — that is what we mean by saying that meetings should be open to everyone in Postcrossing.
I consider a meetup “official” when it has been posted to the PC forum (and then be in the list on the website) - and according to the Logo guidelines, a meeting needs to be published there in order to print postcards with the postcrossing logo on it.
I use the terms of “meeting” and “meet-up” (hyphened or not) interchangeably. Not sure if that’s a European thing or if the website or the term came first.
I agree - rules and guidelines are only as good as the possibility to enforce them. So, common sense and hoping for the best?!?
The model of “making official” that you describe from geocaching is what’s done in the forum - without the regional part.
@Beatitudinem - With the exception of some clinically shy postcrossers: That behavior is just plain rude! Mass signing should also not be the focus of a gathering as stated by @paulo and @meiadeleite in their initial guideline post.) I have mailed cards to people that were looking for meeting cards, but those were unsigned. But I feel that for some, signed/stamped meeting cards are some kind of a postcrossing crypto currency. 
It’s positive to see discussion going on around this — that’s the point of putting it up for feedback.
I think there’s some confusion though, so I’ll try to address some points to help the discussion to continue in a good direction.
Meetups should be open to everyone in Postcrossing, without discrimination
I think @meiadeleite has already cleared this bit but I’d like to go again into it because we really think the part of no discrimination is important — it’s no accident that this is the first thing on the Meetups guidelines!
The “without discrimination” doesn’t mean meetups should have an unlimited number of spots, or that the host should cope with as many people as there are interested ones. Events often have constraints that put limits on the number of participants: be it the space where it will take place, or limitations of an activity that is part of the meetup program, sometimes even the number of available beds/hotels!
And as much as I like to watch the owners of little corner shops open their eyes and mouths in disbelief when they see a huge number of postcrossers suddenly flocking around their postcards stands 
, that is not the goal of this! I think we can all agree that a large amount of participants doesn’t necessarily translate into a nice event. Both small and large meetings can be great in their own ways: we are not trying to inflate meetups numbers here — we’d rather have better events (of any size) than more of them.
So, in short, “without discrimination” doesn’t mean one has to accept an unlimited amount of people.
What it does mean however is that there shouldn’t exist a selective way to decide who is able to participate or not, by filtering the participants through some arbitrary criteria. We want these events to be welcoming to every member of the Postcrossing community.
For example, we have been seeing some meetups where postcrossers are refused participation because the meeting was full from the start when it was announced to the community on the forum, as it was organized elsewhere among a small group of friends and so other members of the community can not realistically join it; effectively, it’s a meeting of friends, not a Postcrossing meetup — even if it may have postcards in the mix and even if they may all be postcrossers. As @sannah82 said,
If it is not open to the whole Postcrossing community, then is not welcoming. If it is a group of friends meeting, great — but it shouldn’t be called a Postcrossing meetup and it shouldn’t be added to the meetups calendar (as it is not letting anyone know of something they can join).
We have also seen some other abuses in terms of discrimination related with events that I don’t want to go into here, but enough to say that it is not the kind of things we want Postcrossing to be connect it as it doesn’t even follow the “Be friendly” of the Community Guidelines.
Now, having said all this, we also see important issues being brought up by @Afonya and @Beatitudinem which are relevant to be taken into account into the discussion here:
This is sad and not something we consider to be a Postcrossing Meetup, really.
If (some) people come to these events just for grabbing postcards and go away, without actually meeting others and taking part of the activities, then it looks to me more like a pop-up shop than an event where people meet. It is called a meetup after all! If the event has some program/activities, and people are not taking part in them, then I would say they are not event participants in the first place?
I think events where some people just come to literally pick up (meeting) postcards and deliberately not meet people is surely something that we do not want to encourage, so I do understand the reasoning for the suggestion about removing the “without discrimination” part as to make it possible prevent that kind of participations.
These Meetup guidelines are a good place to handle these issues. However, I would very much prefer not to cripple the Meetups guidelines through removing the without discrimination part which we think is important. Instead, I would suggest we add (or change) something in the Meetup guidelines that avoid this type of situations so that the hosts are not faced with it in the first place. Perhaps we could re-work the following section:
It’s fine to write some postcards during the meetup, but please try to limit the number of postcards you ask others to sign: allow postcrossers time to chat and be social as well.
into highlighting further that Meetups are meant to be social events that one joins and takes part on (and not just drives by to pick up postcards 
). Does anyone have suggestions on how to best frame this?
Or, is the first paragraph (“an opportunity for members to meet face to face, chat and make friends, share their enthusiasm for Postcrossing or just have fun together”) already covering it, allowing hosts to require participants to not just drive-by-for-meeting-postcards?
I understand that the pandemic has brought additional restrictions that makes organizing these events harder and more unpredictable, with unplanned changes: this is to be expected these days (unfortunately), and participants are aware of the situation we are all facing so, hopefully they are understanding of changes too.
But I think the way here would be for the host to let everyone know from the start (which ideally should be the 2 weeks or more in advance) that changes may happen and should join only under that understanding, or, that some details might need to be finalized closer to the date. If local regulations prevent the meetup from taking place at the planned date, I’m sure participants will understand that it gets cancelled. I think the community gains more from the advance notice about meetups so that anyone can join, than it might loose from the ones that are “announced” last minute that only a few know about.
I’d like to note here that these Meetups guidelines are not only for this pandemic period (which we all hope goes away soon) but to be ongoing for the foreseeable future. It would be better to have some exceptions (if we have to) to the Meetups guidelines during pandemic, than some Meetup guidelines that only make sense during the pandemic. Meetups exist for over a decade and hopefully will continue for more to come, so we should think of them in the context of the so called normal times (even if it is hard to think of it right now).
And on that note,
To be honest, I’m not sure how the whole thing got named that way. 
It could have been me… or @mundoo, or someone, that many years ago used the term and it ended up sticking and the forum category got named that way. Or maybe it was the other way around. Or maybe we were inspired by meetup.com indeed since it was bigger at the time. I don’t think there’s a way to know anymore. @mundoo, any idea?
In any case, I sort of like that we have our own moniker for the meetings, even if it is kind of a typo. 
Paulo, thank you so much for understanding my question and being so attentive! This is very valuable and important.
I will be waiting for suggestions and advice from you and other experienced meeting organizers.
I’d be interested in some more direction or discussion about this:
At our meetings so far, I have designed and had cards printed, which people have signed and distributed at the meetup. Generally, it’s been only me as organiser who brought cards, although I’d be very happy for anyone else to do so.
Although our meet ups are very sociable and there is plenty of chatting, I’ve found that people very much want to be able to get a decent number of cards at the meet up, so we always have quite a lot of cards, and are signing/stamping throughout.
I don’t know that this can or should be strictly set in the guidelines (ie. a set number per participant), but I’d be interested to hear what people think, especially if people have suggestions for ways to change the dynamic a bit here.
Also more generally, it would be good to have some suggested other activities in the guidelines (maybe even a wiki?). This also helps move things away from sitting and signing…
Thoughts on card signing:
I have been to meetups with the following scenarios:
Only the organizer has made cards for the meetup, and only a single type of card
Only the organizer has made cards for the meetup, but they have created more than one type
Not only the organizer, but other participants have created cards for the meetup as well
In all cases in my experience, there has been no charge to any participants for the cards. Signing can be either hand written signature, rubber stamp or sticker. There has been an expectation that every attendee would sign at the very least a sufficient number of cards such that every attendee would then be able to leave with a given number of cards signed by all attendees. As an example, 20 attendees all sign 20 x 15 = 300 cards and each attendee then leaves with 15 completely signed cards. Even in this small example, the numbers can get high. I have seen hosts bring 1000 or 1500 cards, and guests bring an additional 500 or 1000 cards. Usually there is social discussion around the signing table(s). But it gets limiting as you can only talk to those seated near you, and the cards just keep coming in a never ending torrent. There is a point at which that becomes exhausting, both to manage in terms of who has signed which cards yet, and merely as an end user expected to sign hundreds of cards. Setting numbers in the guidelines is not enforceable, and how would you come up with what number is appropriate? It is very subjective I think. It is my though that participation in this part of any event should be voluntary and not compulsory.
I like the idea of limiting the event card to the one being produced by the host, but I suspect that not everyone will agree with that. I find it somewhat confusing and frustrating that there can be more thane card for the same event, but that is just me.
I think @helent’s idea of providing suggestions for other activities is an excellent one.
In the vague recesses of my memory I think the title for that section was created/named by gridlock (Debashis). Certainly many of us were using meetup.com in those days for bookcrossing meetings and conventions. The former forum title didn’t get migrated across to here in the entirety.
We can easily edit the title if you want but you also have Meetups on the main site menu for the calendar.
We want to finish these Meetups Guidelines as we’d like them to be in place for the time that the world is going to be opening up after all these pandemic waves.
The main pending issue is how to handle members who may come to the meetings with the sole purpose of picking up postcards for their exchanges and not being social with others and/or not taking part of the rest of the event.
We think the following parts of the proposed text already do a fair job at addressing that:
The Postcrossing meetups are community organized events. They are an opportunity for members to meet face to face, chat and make friends, share their enthusiasm for Postcrossing or just have fun together.
It’s fine to write some postcards during the meetup, but please try to limit the number of postcards you ask others to sign: allow postcrossers time to chat and be social as well.
Moreover, we think meeting hosts have other ways to handle this particular issue — while still respecting the Meetups Guidelines being proposed here.
For example, a host/organizer can set a reasonable limit to the number of postcards each person can have for others to sign (as some meetings already do). This request can be done on the meeting announcement and can be accompanied with an explanation that the goal of that particular event is to create a cozy/friendly meeting for the community, with opportunities for everyone to be social. Having the Meetup Guidelines in place should help further emphasize this.
If anyone has any suggestions or improvements to tackle this issue, please do say so! It would be particularly relevant to hear suggestions from meetup organizers being directly affected by this problem.
And if there are other things to take into consideration for the Meetup Guidelines, please let us know so that we can move forward with publishing the final text. Everyone’s feedback is welcome!
There was a recent meetup held nearby. The host was contacted by a prospective attendee and asked to provide the files created to print the meetup card, so that they could print additional cards to bring and have signed. The host declined, but this is also another issue that you might want to address. Some meetup organizers create multiple cards for their events, and some meetup attendees either attempt to duplicate the event cards, or create additional cards of their own to bring. Any of these scenarios lead to more cards being passed around for signature.
I also think that the guidelines will likely end up being a working document. While I applaud your effort to gather feedback and input and incorporate it in the development of the guidelines, I suspect that once they are officially promulgated you may well get more feedback.
I don’t know exactly what happened there — seems a strange request/decision on both sides, but I’m probably missing details. In any case, I’m not sure it’s possible to have guidelines that specify how to go about every single detail, when each case is different. I think going for broad questions that the majority can agree with is more important.
The meetup guidelines being discussed already do remind that meetup postcards are optional, and also that anyone can create one. There’s sometimes an incorrect perception that only the organizer can do postcards for the meetup, but there’s no reason for that other than it being the most common case, but there’s no such a rule anywhere — anyone can bring postcards with them to send at the meeting, which can be store bought, homemade, or even something personalized for the meeting.
Like the Community Guidelines or the Forum Guidelines, I do expect that improvements may be done to it over time, but I wouldn’t go as far as calling it a “working document”. For these to be reasonably effective they shouldn’t be constantly changing so that the community knows what’s in place and what to expect. So, yes, I expect changes to be done in the future, but I think it’s on everyone’s interest to avoid frequent changes to it.
The feedback will be welcome, but new ideas need to be batched together for a future update down the road, again, so that we are not constantly changing and the community know what to expect.
That said, the feedback ideally should be beforehand (now!) so that the first version of the text takes as much into account as possible already. We are currently messaging some meetup organizers to bring their attention to this topic and hope to wrap up soon if there’s no new input to consider.
So every kind of meetings which filter participants in a way or another are (strongly) discouraged? Besides a number of the limited meeting spots already taken on the opening the thread on the Forum, I have also read about meetings where first-time-ever-participants are given priority over other postcrossers wanting to join the event. I agree that “first come, first served” principle is the fairest approach. 
I don’t know if it was already discussed.
But I saw some meetups that are already full when they are announced here in the forum, so they aren’t really open to everyone as one has the feeling they are only announced here to use the postcrossing logo and swap cards. Although I’m not sure if there’s something to do to avoid that… 
The organizer had put a lot of time and effort into designing the cards. and did not want to give those files out for anyone to print. The attendee who asked for the files so they could print more cards does this routinely for most events they attend, but I am not sure why.
I think that allowing multiple parties to either create or bring cards to sign undermines the ability of the organizer to manage the meeting. One of your overarching goals here seems to be re-focusing meetups towards the social gathering aspect, and moving meetups away from being just a giant card signing exercise. Allowing or encouraging additional cards to be created/brought by parties other than the organizers is counter to this goal. You can’t have it both ways, and by trying to accommodate everyone, you cause more stress for the organizers.
Somewhere in here there is a sweet spot that accommodates the most flexibility while also discouraging the worst behavior. The challenge is to find that sweet spot. I think it is also important to keep in mind that any set of laws/rules/guidelines/moral codes or whatever term is chosen, in any society, only really work for two reasons: the participants in that group generally honor them and abide by them, and the authorities enforce them when that does not happen. In our case, we have a completely voluntary set of organizers who are not empowered to enforce any promulgated guidelines, and an authority who does not really have the time, or resources to monitor the meetup activities closely enough to provide enforcement back-up to the volunteer organizers. This is why I said I thought it would be a working document. I get that you’d like it to be more or less one and done, but I think once implemented, as organizers and participants try to adjust to the new guidelines, you are bound to get more feedback. Which you then batch, and update. I think we are really on the same page here.
I’d also like to see some mention and guidance regarding virtual meetups in the guidelines. Numerous virtual meetups have been hosted during the pandemic, and are likely to continue after lockdowns end. These allow postcrossers who’d otherwise never be able to meet to gather and share ideas and cultures and are relatively easy to organize and run. They don’t suffer issues regarding postcard signing, but often have cards created and distributed just like face-to-face meetups do. They have proven quite popular with attendees, and this should be seriously considered.
In short, yes.
We aim that, as much as possible, Postcrossing is a welcoming community for everyone. I think this is an aspect of Postcrossing that the majority can all agree with: it is a global project/community where people of different backgrounds/cultures/beliefs/etc can connect. So, we think it’s important that meetups reflect this spirit too and that there are no arbitrary filters deciding who can or not join — they should be open events. To be clear, this doesn’t mean that they can’t have a limited number of spots (especially nowadays!) — just that those spots are available to the whole community and not to a (pre-)screened few.
We do understand (and could maybe even agree with) the reasoning for such “priority” sometimes. One could argue it’s also welcoming even, as it allows more (new) members to join these events. But, to allow hosts to specify such filters, it also means hosts could decide to filter based on other some “less optimal” ideas… who (and how) gets to decide what’s fair then? We would rather avoid having to be the juries of that if we can.
So, yes, I think something like a “first come, first served” is a fair way to do this. That said, I can imagine a random lottery system among all people interested could work just as well — one could argue that that could even be more fair since everyone gets a equal chance and isn’t biased towards those who happen to spot the announcement first. Anyhow, the guidelines don’t specify how exactly to go about this — just that meetings should be open to everyone in the community, without discrimination.
This has been mentioned earlier and it’s definitely something we don’t welcome. If a meeting is announced to the Postcrossing community when it is already full, then it’s not a Postcrossing meeting as the community can’t realistically take part. It can perfectly be a meeting among friends who already know each other — and that’s fine, but that should not be called a Postcrossing meetup if they are not open to Postcrossing’s community (nor it is allowed to use the logo in that case).
I have to disagree here. A meetup host has no particular rights over designing a meetup postcard: anyone can design one. If someone goes to a meeting and doesn’t quite want to use a meetup card that someone did (for whatever reason — perhaps it’s ugly and/or they just don’t like it), they are not forced to use/buy it. A meetup participant is free to bring their own cards and use those if they prefer and yes, they can even design their own card for the meetup too, and even offer it to others too. The meetup organizers’ responsibility is to organize the meeting — not necessarily providing a single meetup postcard. Forbidding meetup participants from using their own cards (regardless if they were designed for the meetup or not) doesn’t make sense to me.
And, just to be clear, I’m fully aware that meetup organizers often do the special postcards for the meetups — and that’s fine and I’m sure appreciated by participants. I’m just saying participants can send whatever cards they want from the meeting — and that can be their own design too.
More stress from having others taking the task to design a card for the meeting? I think that can even remove some of the stress. Having the participants help with the organization and even be an active part of planning the meeting is something we’d be happy to see more of.
I think you are probably right and we’ll hear even more once these are put in place. And we’ll probably have to do improvements to them later as we learn about their shortcomings and/or omissions — which is probably a good thing and is a good reason to get these published soon.
Thus, in the next few days we’ll start working on publishing these Meetup Guidelines to get the word out about them.
Thank you everyone for the feedback!
I recently stumbled upon a “meeting” organised in Spain, which was already full when the first forum member replied, a couple of hours after the announcement.
Later, more postcrossers asked how it could already be full, and the organiser explained that most (or all of the) places had been taken by aficionados.
I wonder if you guys plan on doing anything to concretely discourage such a behaviour.
We’ll have to agree to disagree then. It sounds more like your hope would be that I might organize a meeting, but then just let things happen as they may when everyone shows up. Part of my agenda might be to print cards and have everyone sign some. So say 20 people attend and I have them all sign ten cards, and then everyone gets to take 10 with them. As an attendee, you don’t have to sign cards if you don’t want to, and you don’t have to take any cards you don’t want. But those who choose to participate in the signing activity (let’s say in this case everyone does, for ease of numbers) will have to sign 200 cards in my example. We can socialize while we sign etc., etc. Except, wait, Paolo brought 200 cards he made and wants everyone to sign. And so did Mary and Sally and Joe. This has now turned into something quite different than what the organizer envisioned, and it has also moved from being the sort of event that your guidelines seem to intend to be promoting (some card signing with more emphasis on socializing) into exactly the opposite of what you seem to want. The above is a real world example, by the way.
My argument is not so much about who has the right to create cards for the meetup; if you want to make cards for the meetup and take that off my plate and volunteer to do so, that is great. My concern is more about who is controlling the agenda and proceedings once it starts. The more people who bring extra cards to sign, the more I lose control of that. It feels like you’d love to have me got to the time and effort of organizing a event, but when the event begins, you want me to just step back and watch what happens. That was where my comment about additional stress was coming from.
Please address the topic of virtual meetings in the guidelines. That topic has been brought up here and in other forum discussions and always seems to get overlooked. Respectfully request a response from the leadership on this topic.
Another point was brought up in the topic about an upcoming meetup in Austria.
Some would-be attendees complained that the list was almost full but none of the listed people had commented on the forum.
One of the hosts replied that “it’s a postcrossing meeting, not a forum members meeting, so people can sign up via postcrossing as well. There are also Postcrossers who are not Forum members.”
It looks like some users can’t forget the old forum with a separate account from the main Postcrossing site… You may want to address this point, as well.
I don’t think it’s a problem. If you - as an organiser - plan with 10 cards per person, just state that this is the maximum amount for signing per person. It doesn’t matter which cards are getting signed though… only the amount matters. I’ve been to some meetings that limited the number of cards per participant, so the signing would not be the only possible activity.
These can be reported to the team.
The issue is how those got their spots? If the community (of aficionados or otherwise) at large didn’t get a chance, then it’s not an open/welcoming meetup, right?
The Meetups Guidelines being discussed here already make it that more explicit (“Meetups should be open to everyone in Postcrossing, without discrimination.”) so that the community is aware of it and doesn’t let those issues take place.
If a meeting is already full when it is announced to the community, we will do our best not to add the meeting to the meetups calendar (and, by extension, the logo cannot be used on those meetup postcards). This is already what we (try to) do and that won’t change — the Meetups Guidelines will mostly raise awareness (and make it more explicit) of some things that are OK and not OK to do.
So, the meeting was organized… in someone’s profile page? 
Probably not. And accessing the forum is now even easier for everyone to easily participate, so I don’t understand the reasoning.
The Postcrossing forum is the common place to the whole community and where all meetings are announced (to then be added to the meetups calendar). How people get a spot is not covered by the Meetups Guidelines being discussed — I suppose that can be done on the meetup topic itself but also via forum message, via direct message (on website), email or even other ways — as long it doesn’t require to necessarily sign up for a social network elsewhere (“Make sure everyone can join the meetup and receive all information without having to create an account on another website or social network.”). The focus here is in preventing that a meetup is already full when it is announced on the forum to the community, which makes it not open to everyone.