Proposal: make the Ansible Forum the home for Meetup conversations
TL;DR: We propose moving away from Meetup Pro and using the Ansible Forum for event information and community discussion, with Pretix for registration and ticketing.
This would give each city a place to plan and share events, while providing organisers with registration and check-in tools. It would also bring event conversations into the Ansible community’s existing spaces, where people can ask questions and share what they learn after an event.
This is a proposal, and we want your feedback before we settle the details. In particular, we want to hear what would make events easier to find and attend, what organisers need to run them, and what the Community Team must plan for a safe and sustainable service.
What we need from an event platform
Our requirements include:
- Registration and RSVP, including collecting a real name (as needed by many venues)
- Event reminders and updates for people who register.
- Discoverability for people who are not already on the Forum.
- Community ownership: organisers should be able to run local events without relying on a central team for every routine task.
- Privacy and data protection: registration can involve cities, names and email addresses, so access, retention, and responsibilities must be clear.
- A lasting place for community knowledge: event plans, questions, agendas, and follow-up should be easy to find and contribute to.
The proposal
Pretix for registration and event operations
Pretix is an open-source ticketing platform with an API, configurable team permissions, and check-in tools. Its check-in apps support offline scanning and can synchronize later, which may help at venues with unreliable Wi-Fi. See the Pretix feature overview and security information.
We propose using Pretix to:
- Collect registrations and send registration-related updates.
- Collect a real name when the venue requires it.
- Give organisers access to the events they need to manage, with permissions configured for their role.
- Check in attendees and get a more useful picture of attendance than RSVP totals alone.
- Provide calendar information with registration emails, where supported by our event configuration.
The current proposal is for Pretix to be hosted by Red Hat’s Open Source and AI Program Office (OSAIPO). We need to confirm the hosting arrangement, operational responsibilities, and privacy details before launch. OSAIPO have experience with this as they hosts Fedora Projects Pretix instance.
The Ansible Forum for event information and discussion
The Forum would be the central place to discover events and talk about them.
Each participating city would have a Forum category or subcategory where organisers can:
- Publish the event’s main information page.
- Discuss plans and shape the agenda.
- Invite speakers and answer questions.
- Share materials and follow up after the event.
The Forum topic would be the canonical event information page. It would link to the Pretix registration page, and the Pretix event would link back to the Forum topic. Event details would not automatically synchronize between the two systems, so organisers would keep the Forum topic up to date and make sure its registration link is correct.
The proposal also uses city-based Forum notifications so people can follow events in places they care about. We need your feedback on how to make those notifications useful and easy to manage. City notification groups would be private, with membership visible only to Forum administrators.
How people would use it
Finding an event and choosing notifications
People can browse the Forum Events category. Forum users can also set their event-location preferences in their Forum profile. Events can also be promoted through the Bullhorn weekly newsletter, social media, and other community channels so that people who are not already following a city category can hear about them.
We want to hear which channels actually help you find events, especially if you are not a regular Forum user.
Registering
An attendee reads the event information on the Forum, follows the link to Pretix, and registers there. The Pretix page links back to the Forum topic for discussion and updates. We have developed a Pretix auth plugin, to use Ansible Forum as SSO. This provides an easier user experience, reinforces Ansible Forum as source of truth, and allows us to easily award Forum Badges for attendance.
The proposed Forum authentication integration is intended to make this journey feel connected. Registration details, including any real name a venue requires, would remain in Pretix rather than being posted to the Forum. As this scales for free, it allows us to have dedicated city-based groups, ie 11+ Indian city based groups rather than overly generic cumbersom ansible-india or ansible-ireland groups.
Organising an event
Organisers would collaborate in their city’s Forum sub-category, publish the event information there, and create the registration page in Pretix. The Forum topic would remain the place to find the latest event information; Pretix would handle registrations and check-in.
We want to make sure this workflow is practical for organisers and does not add unnecessary duplication.
On the day and afterwards
Organisers can use Pretix check-in tools to record attendance, including offline check-in where the venue’s network is unreliable. After the event, the Forum topic can hold links to slides, notes, photos, recordings, and discussion, subject to speaker consent and the event’s privacy expectations. All of this would be shared to the wider Ansible Community via the following weeks Bullhorn, allowing continued wider discussion and learning.
Moving from Meetup Pro
We know that many people currently use Meetup Pro to follow local Ansible events. We want the transition to be clear and gradual, with instructions for choosing Forum locations and following the relevant city notifications.
We are not proposing to silently copy Meetup Pro account or attendee information into the new system. Meetup Pro users haven’t consented to allow their data (email addresses) to be used that way. Also we believe in opt-in. Before any migration steps are taken, we need a clear plan for communication, consent, data handling, and what, if anything, can be transferred.
Why these tools? Why not Luma
We considered Luma, which offers event and co-hosting features. Our proposal favors Pretix because it is open source, can be self-hosted, and offers event-team permissions and check-in tools that have been developed over the past 10 years. Paired with the Forum, it also keeps event discussion in Ansible’s community space.
One of the specific limitations of Luma, is that free versions (needed per city) only allow 3 organizers. Most of the Ansible Community events have many more organizers per city.
A Forum-only approach would put discussion and event information together, but would not provide the focused registration and check-in workflow we need for events where organisers must manage attendee lists or venues require names.
Once we get all this setup, we could look at cross-posting events to Luma to aid with discovery.
If you use Luma today, please subscribe to luma.com/ansible-community today.
Privacy and access
Protecting attendee information is essential. The proposal is to keep registration details in Pretix and limit access according to the organiser’s role and event responsibilities. Real names (required by some venues) WILL NEVER be copied into the Forum.
Before launch, we need to confirm and publish:
- Which registration fields are required, and why.
- Who can access attendee information, including event organisers and service administrators.
- How long registration data is retained and how it can be deleted.
- The responsibilities of the event organisers, Red Hat, and the platform providers.
- What information is shared between Forum and Pretix as part of the sign-in and registration process.
Pretix publishes information about its security practices and privacy approach. Those materials are useful input, but we still need to document how our own event setup will handle data.
Current privacy proposal
We are currently thinking of the following, which would only be visible by the individual member and Ansible Forum Admins (Ansible Community Team at Red Hat). This means even members of a city’s meetup wouldn’t know who else is interested in that city, and improvement over Meetup Pro
- NEW: Forum Group per city
- NEW: Profile option to select cities you are interested in (shown at signup, editable at anypoint)
Pretix would be the only place realnames are stored (and also have an associateion between real name, Forum ID, city. Meetup organizers for that city would be able to see these details for the city they are organisers for. That is the same as with Meetup pto
Where we need your help
Please reply in this thread. You do not need to answer every question—tell us what matters most to you.
If you attend Ansible Meetups
- How do you currently hear about events? What would help you discover events in a new city or community?
- Would you use Forum location preferences and city notifications? How would you expect to manage them?
- What would make registration, reminders, and event-day check-in easier?
- Do you have concerns about registering through Pretix, including the information a venue may require?
- What would help you feel confident about how your information is used?
Action: Share one thing that would make you more likely to find and attend an event.
If you organise Ansible Meetups
- Would the Forum-plus-Pretix workflow fit how you plan and run events?
- What do you need to manage registrations, attendee communications, and check-in?
- What permissions should local organisers have, and what information should they be able to see?
- What would make it easier to promote events and share slides or other follow-up?
- What training, documentation, or support would help your city move?
Action: Describe one part of organising that this proposal should make easier—and one potential blocker.
If you are part of the Ansible Community Team
- What needs to be true for hosting, maintenance, support, and incident response to be sustainable?
- What privacy, retention, access-control, and data-processing decisions must be settled before launch?
- How should we help cities join, manage organiser access, and keep event information current?
- What would a safe migration and communications plan for Meetup Pro members look like?
- Which measures would show that the change is working—for example, event discovery, registrations, attendance, or organiser effort?
Action: Identify a requirement or risk we need to resolve before a pilot.
What happens next?
We will use feedback from attendees, organisers, and the Community Team to refine the proposal, document unresolved decisions, and decide whether to run a pilot. Please reply with your questions, concerns, and suggestions—and tell us which persona you are responding as, if that helps give context.
Open collaboration is part of the goal: we want the documentation and process to be understandable, reviewable, and improvable by the community.
