To Casseia’s very good question.

Yes, the meetup website is (or was the last time I looked at it)
truly well designed to assist in helping people to get together
with similar interests. And the free websites even with calendar
functions like yahoo and google groups don’t come close to that
functionality, ease of use, and ease of finding the kind of group
you’re interested in. When they started charging fees, I did research
but there was nothing comparable out there for free at the time although
there were those trying, see for example this website which was called
“Meet the Meetup Replacements”, http://www.allen.com/cgi-bin/gt/tpl.h,content=122
I haven’t done any internet searches on this since that time. Maybe somebody
did come up with a just-as-good free alternative that’s out there. I don’t
have time these days to look or even use our local meetup as an outreach
or activism tool, so for the time being I’m content with it being a small cozy
discussion only group unfortunately.

If there still aren’t comparable free alternatives out there, another suggestion would
be to point people to one particular 911 website where contact information or location/time info
for people meeting about 9/11 truth in different geographical regions is listed and linked to, and asking
other 911 websites to link to it. The website for that (you can see with
a trip to the web archive) used to be http://www.septembereleventh.org But this is
a cautionary tale, which warns those to be careful about what websites they
will associate with or link to or allow themselves to be listed on. That website,
http://www.septembereleventh.org , now for example, still bears at the top of it’s front
page an article by it’s webmaster, Emanuel Sferios called “9/11 Five Years Later:
What have we accomplished” which notes in its conclusion that:

“In the Spring of this year, I gave a presentation on 9/11 truth to the Howard Dean
supporters during a Democracy For America conference in Portland, Oregon. I felt bad
afterwards because there were a lot of new and enthusiastic 9/11 truth activists in the
audience, folks who had only recently broke free from the matrix, so to speak, and I basically
told them that I felt the movement was over, that we had failed, and that the window of
opportunity for obtaining justice for 9/11 was closed for good.”

And earlier this month, I kid you not, Sferios advised ALL PEOPLE WHO SIGNED UP TO RECEIVE EMAILS FROM THAT WEBSITE that he’s resigning from the website, moving to Latin America, and oh yeah that he’s SELLING FOR $500 each to get money for his travel expenses on a first come first serve basis the following three domains “September-11.com; September-11th.com; and septembereleventh.net which currently point to SeptemberEleventh.org. (it takes all kinds and I am NOT making this stuff up.)

Anyway, now the local group information that used to be at Septembereleventh.org is now
at this website http://www.911truth.org/page.php?page=grassroots_contacts and that’s
another decision to be made, whether one wants to affiliate themselves with that 911truth.org
website, which has, for example, of late announced that their website is not just about 9/11 any more:

“We’ve made a host of significant improvements to the layout
of our site, www.911truth.org, and you will also notice that
our front page has recently been home to a number of articles
on subjects other than 9/11. Given the seriousness of the political
situation in the US and the continuing assault on civil liberties and
the rule of law, you can be sure we will continue to host articles we
judge to be politically important.

I’m blown away by the audacity of those who seek to be the 911
clearinghouse and who have the generic “911truth” name to think they
can judge for the rest of us what’s politically important, as if
there was a universal consensus of that in the 9/11 truth movement.
I’ve certainly had my differences with this website in the past, over
both 9/11 (for their negligence supporting and lihop supporting
prominent limited hangout lines among other reasons) as well as for
their peak oil scam supporting, fake 2 party “democracy” supporting
politics, so bottom line warning - website linkage beware at your own risk.

I suggest it’s better to use a free website which is FREE for all and beholden to NO ONE
and no one’s politics and which could always be displaying a post
with local 9/11 contacts and/or meeting info letting people in the specific geographical
regions decide for themselves whether that region’s different 9/11 meetups are ones
they would want to interact with. Portland’s 9/11 indymedia webpage could
be a good candidate for this as it has sufficient member strength to maintain a pro-911 truth
line & its 9/11 posts (on its far right column) are uncensored. It’s low
traffic I think, so the turnover of posts is not fast, and its where people could
add their own local meeting info as comments to the original post, and maybe someone could periodically organize and repost the page of info (complete with past page links just for proof all included) so it’s always on its 9/11 mainpage at http://portland.indymedia.org/en/topic/911investigation/ in the far right column, or better yet, perhaps those in Portland could arrange to have their 9/11 page
include such a post in their center column with a fixed link so it could be included in flyers and other
9/11 promotional materials to advertise to all newbies.

Of course if someone does come up with a place for a central repository of only
local 9/11 contact meetup information and gets 911 sites to link to it, it should first be passed on to interested parties already having such meetups so that it would start off with the information on the most currently existing groups one can find, not just the ones currently listed on 911truth.org's page. And unfortunately, that would require time consuming searches through yahoo and google groups with different query terms and also the non-free 911 meetup website would need to be surveyed for those 911 meetup groups which chose to absorb the fees and stay with the website. To get that meetup.com info, someone would have to either pay the membership fee or find a meetup member and ask to borrow their logon information (like from Joe in Dallas in the above post). Back in the day, it was very tedious & time consuming to contact all other meetup users who had expressed an interest in a 9/11 groups in their area, you could only contact them individually through their mail system as they didn’t provide you with the person’s email address. I remember once sending 500 separate emails through their system (that was the monthly maximum) when there was a problem with the meetup website having renamed all of
the 911 meetup groups & also changing the group’s definition so that the groups sounded like
911 commission SUPPORTER groups, but around the time the meetup.com website began instituting fees, I think they began creating ways to make it easier for meetup members to contact en masse
other meetup members with similar interests and they also began adding discussion groups to their website features making it all the easier. Maybe Joe from Dallas could advise if that's the case.

Good luck to anyone working to centralize information and make it easier for people to meet in person with others about 9/11 - whether their logistical meeting information is currently located at the fee-charging meetup site, or the free yahoo/ google/ riseup, 911truth.org and all other groups all in one website on the internet beholden to no one and free to all.

Angie