Using the in-person book club example, I'm having a hard time imagining a scenario where 1) nobody pays anything to anyone, 2) the same person hosts every meeting, 3) food and/or drink is provided and not pot luck style.
If you're in an in-person book club you'll be paying money either directly or indirectly. Small sums absolutely, but still something. This seems comparable in cost.
Sorry, where in the original link are they providing food? I might be more interested in that case. :D
It's wild to me that you can't imagine a non-transactional club. Do you not have groups of friends? Sure, there's some give-and-take in every healthy group, but the idea that it somehow needs to be monetized is absurd.
Creating a slack instance is not building a community.
The "fee" is just a simple way to get commitment from the other side. As you can imagine, this is not a business that will allow me to quit my job.
I just don't feel that the rewards I receive from community organizing are monetary, and certainly don't need to be.
Nor do I want to be part of a community whose organizers are only motivated by money and don't even see any other form of motivation as valid. If that's how you see yourself and the community you're organizing, that colors everything you do and it makes you a bad community leader.
I basically organise the community because I enjoy reading books and sharing opinion with other professionals, that's it.
But your execution doesn't match that intention. What you have created is a business. You're talking about "commitment"--that's a business concern. "Sustainability"--also a business concern. I've had plenty of rewarding conversations about engineering books with people who I never saw again, and I've gained a lot of knowledge at book clubs that no longer exist. A lot of that knowledge came from people who only showed up once.
What you lose when you demand commitment and sustainability, i.e. a business model from your book club, is spontaneity and diversity. The kind of guy who commits himself to a book club every week for years is going to miss the life experiences that give context to his work. It's how you end up with solutions that are perfectly engineered to efficiently do the wrong things.
I live in a city that has many free tech meetups.
One of them involved going through fast.ai. Tech companies were happy to host us for free.
Another was about doing Kaggle competition to practice ML with fellow newbies. Again, tech companies allowed us to use their space after hours, or we'd just to the library and book a room for free.
Vice versa other groups that revolve around learning specific languages or going through specific technical books.
And if you're really lucky, a large corporate enterprise will let you have hosting space for _free_ at _very specific times_. Otherwise, you must find local community resources who usually: 1. Charge a fee 2. Request you do something for them in exchange (run some publicity, sweeping floors, etc.)