Democrats & Liberals: Archives

MeetUp is not a dating service (at least primarily). It is a way to organize regular meetings based on common interests, such as Weblogging, Metafilter, entrepreneurism, and so forth. It is much closer to a system like Yahoo Invite than anything else, except that you have to petition the site managers to anonymously consider and choose which topics to build MeetUps around. Several political candidates have MeetUps; the difference here is that the Dean campaign is actively courting the MeetUp event attendees.

According to a _The New Republic_ article (I’m not posting the link, because this article is viewable only to pay subscribers), the meetup group formed independently of his campaign.

For the Dean campaign, it all started with the Meetup phenomenon. Back in January, the campaign stumbled upon the Meetup website and noticed that 432 people were signed up for a Howard Dean Meetup group. “We didn’t really know what it was,” says [campaign manager Joe]Trippi. He watched from afar as Dean’s Meetup numbers grew to more than 2,600 in February. In March, Dean showed up at a Meetup event in New York City. It was so crowded that hundreds of young supporters were pouring out onto the sidewalk waiting to get in. Soon the campaign began receiving mysterious donations with an extra cent added. They learned that the Meetup community intended to raise $1 million for Dean, and the extra cent was being used to identify the donations. It became known as the Meetup Million Dollar Challenge and has raised at least $300,000 for Dean so far (close to 10 percent of what Dean had raised overall, as of April). Almost overnight, Meetup had become the Dean campaign’s most important organizing tool.

Hookup site indeed :)