In my experience, it's really hard to get a meetup approved, especially for a new user, unless you do a really generic photo walk.
The type of meetup that's most common in Thailand is to invite a specialist to give a lecture, while a group listens to that lecture. That kind of meetup doesn't fit nicely into any of the predefined buckets. I had a friend who had her meetup rejected because the lecture wasn't enough about Google Maps (the specialist helped startup businesses, and was going to explain what he did, and also explain Google Maps integration into his work), and also because she had named the meetup in a way that used Google's trademarks in a way that violated something.
Those are probably valid points, but they aren't actually written down anywhere. I had one of my meetups rejected because of a picture that I used, and there's nowhere that lists out guidelines for pictures for meetups.
It would also be nice if instead of just rejecting meetups with a couple short sentences, especially when it's the person's first attempt at a meetup, that someone could reach out to them and help them to restructure their meetup into something. Also, it wouldn't take too much effort on the Google Meetup Support's part to rewrite the user's meetup, and give it back to them as a "hey, we changed a few things...just click the publish button if you're okay to do the meetup with our suggestions." Oh, and when meetups get rejected then we LOSE all of our text that we submitted. Now, I save all of my text to a Google Doc first before I submit it, but new users aren't going to do that.
There's a real danger when a new user gets rejected the first time for their meetup, that they'll stop contributing. Right now, just rejecting a lot of new users meetups with short, curt text needs to be improved if we want to get a lot higher participation.
And personally, I'm fine jumping through any hoops that you want me to in order to do meetups. I always like to do something new and original, so I'll probably always have to rework some of my meetups. But what I'm really concerned about is new users. My friend never resubmitted, and she hasn't organized another meetup since. And I suspect there are a lot more people out there like my friend. I'll always keep doing meetups, no matter what it takes, but a lot of new users won't.
2022
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