Hey Thomas,
Meetups and events are @mae’s wheelhouse and I think she left the ball in your court.
This would be a good start. Now that we have returned to a profit-first operating model, we have to carefully consider the costs and ROI of every decision—and that usually starts with data.
To be clear, we love the idea of people getting together to talk about Discourse and we want to support that as much as we can. Sadly, under the current economic climate we don’t have a lot of discretionary budget so we have to scrutinise everything pretty closely. That won’t be the case forever.