Hi Everybody:

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After a few bumps in the road and a couple of errors, it looks like we’ve straightened out the problems and we’ve set up what promises to be a better website to organize ERT meetings. Yahoo! Groups works reasonably well, but there are a number of problems using it to organize our meetings and  encourage growth of membership.

That’s why we’re using an account at Meetup.com. Using an internet portal focused on real world meetings, we’ll have a better system for attracting speakers, expanding our membership and presenting our organization to the community. (We’ve already begun to attract new attendees like Steve McGee. [Glad to meet you Steve!]) For more information on Meetup.com, click here.

What does this mean?

I would strongly encourage all ERT members to create an account at Meetup.com and RSVP when they will attend – mainly to demonstrate the strength of the organization, as photographs have been traditionally forbidden at the ERT and we want prospective members and speakers to be impressed by our regular draw. Currently 12 members have signed up. The process is fairly painless, without consequence, and only requires a few pieces of information (see below). Simply go to http://www.ertsf.org/.

However, for those people who really uninterested in doing this (for whatever reason), we will have Meetup.com send announcements to [address removed], so you will still get speaker information and meeting announcements through email from the Yahoo! Group.

If you sign up for the Meetup.com group and remain a member of the Yahoo! Group, you will start to get emails from both sites. In order to prevent this from happening, you can change your preferences on Yahoo! Groups or email me to help you out.

I don’t anticipate having the Meetup.com group replace the Yahoo! Group, but it’s my expectation that we’ll be using Yahoo! less than in the past.

Please contact me if you have any questions.

Best, Mike