@Toby Cryns - Not exactly. I'm not intimately familiar with the nature of meetup.com, other than having muddled through their APIs a bit.

Essentially, there is a WordPress Foundation account (or something like that) and they ask you to add it as an organizer to the meetup group. This is so the billing can be combined to that account and sent to just one location or something along those lines. However, the other listed organizers remain organizers of the individual group and have all the same admin rights as before. Just has to do with the billing, really.

There's also something about the group being added to the "WordPress community" or some other weird meetup specific thing, to boost the rankings somehow. Not sure on that. I dunno, meetup is weird.

But the goal isn't to take-over the group or to tell people how to best run their meetups. It is to defray the overhead and expenses (we like WordPress to be free), to provide support in the form of best practices and other guidelines and help (mostly stuff made by other meetup organizers), and things along these lines. All this stuff started from the WordPress Community Summit a bit over a year ago, and has been discussed on the make/community site:

http://make.wordpress.org/community/?s=meetup

(Sorry for the weird character set issues, some of these posts recently migrated and we had some importing problems)