Doug K.

This point would be more relevant if the host of the Meetup played a more active role in shaping the process, but the event is almost entirely about the people presenting.

Scott plays a very important and simple role– keep things moving and keep things from getting off track. He jumps in with the occasional question of his own, but his questions are almost always tuned towards clarifying something important (”so, what is this again?”)

He does an excellent job at this, and I don’t see how someone else could improve upon this without changing the nature of the Meetup itself.

Perhaps a trusted guest host, once in a while, would be a good change of pace– but Scott is the man, and he makes sure each event is worth coming to.

#2 – Location

I agree about the long hike over– but the space is so beautiful!

And there aren’t those awful site line issues that the Grand Hall suffers from.

I could go either way with this. The new location is inconvenient, but inspirational just to look at and be inside.

#3 – Remove $5

I doubt they charge $5 because they need the money– I think they wanted to make the event not-free so as to deter random people who don’t know or care about the subject matter enough to pay $5 to participate.

#4 – Missed meeting penalty.

Amen. Might be tricky to implement but something along these lines would be great.

Leader is one thing, MC is another.

Sometimes I don’t know if he had a bad day, but he’s too disrespectful with the presenters, and his jokes are way out of line, which has made me and others not want to come back, it just makes us think there’s no point going there to get bashed by the MC.

You could invite MCs of other meetups, the people at the NY Video 2.0 meetup have a great great MC, and they have really cool dynamics in terms of making everybody participate and network, that meetup is growing, and being smaller they also have sponsors already and stopped charging $5 per meetup.

The video meetup is growing – i’ve seen it continue to grow month over month.

Maybe do this every four or six months! Mix it up a little!

At a NY Tech Meetup, you can run into bloggers, developers, suits, 9-5ers, jobseekers, freelancers, students, entrepreneurs etc. Everyone is looking for something different.

The NY Tech Meetup has transformed over the past year as a result of it’s audience. It feels more structured, corporate, and less forgiving b/c that’s who’s in the audience.

Since Scott has implemented the “cheer when you see something you like”, how many times has the audience cheered? The “what’s to stop Google from building this?” and the “are you going to build a facebook app?” are just as bad as the “what’s your business model?”.

Honestly, I think it just needs to get back to the technology / innovative experiences that people are creating. It’s a Tech Meetup, not the Gong Show.