What are people's thoughts on this?  Grou.ps doesn't really have the best event planning and that is mostly what we do.  However meetup is about $72/yr, nothing significant, but we'd probably want some consistent way to fund it easily (sponsorship is a possibility perhaps Verrus and iQmetrix would be willing to split it).

Sounds good to me... I can also chip in for the meetup costs if you like.

I'm sure Verrus (aka PayByPhone) would be happy to chip in to cover that cost.

Given the crappy facebook integration, I'd rather see a publicly available google calendar that people can subscribe to. That can be associated with the google group. Meetup is a harder integration into smartphones etc.