meetup-raffler

A simple Python script to raffle items to attendees at a meetup.

First used (with some success) at Django-district's Django birthday party:

Use it for your meetup

To use this script at your meetup, all you need is a computer with Python 2.7+ and access to the Meetup administrator tools for a specific event.

To run your own raffle:

1. Go to the Meetup.com page for your event and click "Download attendee list" under "Tools" in the sidebar (or use the sample_attendees.csv file in this repo):

   NOTE: You cannot do this for past meetups - so be sure to export this list the day of your event (which is probably when you want to run the raffle anyway)

2. Open the .xls file Meetup provides and re-save it as a .csv file using an application like Excel or Numbers.

3. Clone this repository - or just download the raffle.py file with curl:

   curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/django-district/meetup-raffler/master/raffle.py
   

4. Open a terminal session and run this command:

   python raffle.py /PATH/TO/YOUR/attendee_list.csv
   

If everything goes right, you'll see some output that looks like this:

AND THE WINNER IS...
Andrew T. Baker (http://www.meetup.com/django-district/members/43552892/)

The script provides the winner's name and a link to their Meetup profile for your group - just in case you have two people with the same name and need to see a photo.

Improve this script

Contributions are welcome! Just fork this repository and submit a PR!

Here are some things that could be improved:

• Reducing the liklihood of duplicate winners - this happened a lot at the Django birthday party. Come up with some way to take an attendee out of the list of entrants after they've already won
• Alter the script to use the .xls file as its input - this would save users the hassle of converting their attendee list to a .csv before running their raffle
• Make the script Python 2/3 compatible - right now it only works with Python 2
• Use a library like click to make the script more user-friendly - click is a great Python library for making command line tools
• Add the script to PyPI - this way other people can use it by running pip install meetup_raffler