meetup growing pains

in the comments on the recent open thread, Janet writes about how Meetup is a victim of its own success:

I am trying to get meetup.com to open up a location in West Contra Costa County, a largely working class, ethnically diverse area north of Berkeley. Folks 10 miles away or so out there in El Sobrante, San Pablo, Hercules & Pinole don't necessarily want to come to an over-crowded cafe in Berkeley. We have an unofficial meetup listed on the action site, but the only registrants are Dean "old timers." Meetup is willing to put up 10 venues on the Oakland/Alameda location for September, but each venue has to get 42 votes (instead of 5, as when 3 venues are listed) in order to be an official meetup.com happening. This is inhibiting our ability to use meetup.com grow new and diverse Dean supporters. If meetup would make a new location, we could start with a smaller official meetup and grow.

Part of why I am putting this on the front page is to put some pressure on Meetup to try and help you guys out - but the other is to try and have an open thread where other people who may have similar problems in adding venues and locations can organize. There is also a "grassroots planning" thread on the Dean Forum where you can continue the discussion well after this post scrolls away.

Remember - Meetup is a fantastic tool but we shouldn't be bound by its limitations in the short term. While waiting for them to catch up, we do have the resources of this blog, the Dean Forum, and of course Yahoo Groups to self-organize.