I started CphEx back in October 2014. I created a Twitter account (https://twitter.com/cph_ex) and a GitHub organisation (https://github.com/cphex/), made some initial noise on the internet about it, planned a formal meet up at a café, and went there not knowing if anyone else would show up. Luckly some did, and since then we have had a meet up every month. We have grown the community and we are now around eight people partaking in the monthly meet ups and our events are now hosted at venues kindly offered by companies located in greater Copenhagen, with projectors and sometimes snacks.
We have had some discussions whether or not we should be on a meet up site of some sort, meetup.com, lanyrd.com, Facebook groups, etc., but personally I have spoken against it for the following reason: They are not inclusive as they force a notion of a structure, and they rise the barrier of participation without giving much back.
My initial strategy with the Github repo was: If you are interested in Elixir and you want to organise a meet up, then go to the CphEx organisation and create an issue in the issue tracker, and then have others helping you out finding a location and perhaps some speakers. This only require you to have a Github account, which is a requirement, but when you have one you can be a CphEx meet up organiser (but please call yourself a co-organiser, and please don't be a jerk if you do).
In other words: You can put as much or as little work in the organisation as you feel like, at any given time. If somebody have a period of low activity another could take over and nobody answers to anyone except the rest of community—No "I am the organiser"-ego-trips; no waiting for a top management to make a call; just get some people together and learn about Elixir and teach others.
That is why having a group on meetup.com is an unfortunately necessity. Elixir groups around the world has chosen meetup.com as the platform to run their organisations, and soon the list of Elixir meet ups around the world, that the mother website of the Elixir programming language will link to, will link to the Elixir-tag on meetup.com—CphEx has no choice but to create a presence on meetup.com, otherwise we would not make it to that list, and others might get the idea that there is no Elixir meetup group in Copenhagen, Denmark and some might go ahead and create one themselves, adding unneeded fragmentation—as it has happened time and time again in the JavaScript community (try making a search for JavaScript groups in Copenhagen; does Copenhagen really need all those organisations about JavaScript? Why don't they band together?)
But, now we are here: CphEx is on meetup.com, there's a box that says Martin Gausby and the word "Organiser" is pinned next to it. Don't get fooled by that: Come to our Github repo and let us help each others to create events around one of the most joyful programming languages on the face of this planet—even though I bought the meetup.com-plan that "allows" me to select 4 organisers; no-one is the "one".
You are Copenhagen Elixir. You are the co-organiser. We are the Elixir community in Copenhagen.
Love, Martin (speaking on my own behalf)