The bad news is that whatever agreement MySQL AB had with Meetup.com has ended. As per the wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/How_to_create_a_user_group:
MySQL AB has an agreement in place with meetup.com to cover the organizer fees. Simply click at the link at the top of the meetup.com page to request your electronic voucher so you can become an organizer.
Unfortunately, this agreement has ended, so there’s going to have to be a more manual process to get MySQL to sponsor the meetup groups. At its cheapest, a year of meetup.com is $144.
The good news is that Giuseppe and Dups (as well as the local Sun/MySQL folks in Boston who also sponsor the pizza and soda we have) have expressed that they are dedicated to sponsoring these user groups, so nobody has to go around digging for spare change just yet.
Here’s the sad e-mail I received:
from Meetup Support
to sheeri
date Mon, May 4, 2009 at 5:52 PM
subject Greetings from Meetup Support (KMM1797374I15977L0KM)
mailed-by meetup.com
Hello Sheeri,
Thanks for your patience while we looked into this!
I did some research and My SQL will no longer be sponsoring Meetup
Groups. Therefore, you’ll need to purchase a subscription plan in order
to continue hosting the Group on Meetup.com. Sorry about that!
There are 3 price plans available:
$12 a month for 6 months (a single $72 charge)
$15 a month for 3 months (a single $45 charge)
$19 per month
Each plan has a 30-day money back guarantee. Organizers can run up to 3
Meetup groups with their subscription.
You can view and update your subscription plan from here:
http://www.meetup.com/account/subscription/
If you have any other questions, please let me know.
Sincerely,
Antonio Ortiz
Meetup Support Specialist
Meetup HQ
1048909 is your incident number. Please do not remove this number from
the message.