Your "no organizer" case sounds more like a group that managed to have multiple organizers, not zero organizers. I'm not sure if this ever came up, but the real test of who the organizer(s) are is what happens when one of the rotating leaders drops the ball.
A lot of my meetup interactions are with a fairly small group and unorganized group, so this may be very different in large groups, but we really do need someone to be the organizer since most people don't show up consistently.
I'm pleased to be so widely referenced! And I've been following these posts and appreciating them, I like the eye you've got for group structures.
Having said that, I'm not going to disagree a bit XD I do agree with Brendan that your case sounds like you've distributed the organizer role, not removed it. This is the strategy both Melting Gold and Overthrow The Organizer Day are pointing at.
For a case report: Around six months ago I switched tactics in Boston Rationality. Previously I'd been trying out lots of formats and activities for the individual meetups, treating myself as a reliable part of the system. Around September of last year, I made a plan to run a month of very easy meetups. (Board games at a pub, and chapter by chapter book discussions in an office building lobby.) I then told people I would be out of town all November, so other people would have to take up the torch. I pitched other meetup ideas and encouraged other people to pitch their meetup ideas. I made a little bit of fanfare when someone ran a meetup and gave them a special colour in the community discord.
Today there's fourteen people who have run a meetup (meaning they're the ones who picked a time and place and announced it on the event channels) in the last year, and by tomorrow there's going to be fifteen. Some do it more commonly than others, but it's now totally normal to have a week where three different organizers are up to something. We've even established that bans are per-person-running-the-meetup; this does mean we're going to have some obnoxious people show up for longer than would be ideal as different meetup runners ban them one by one, but in the other direction I don't feel like this function is resting solely on me anymore.
I call the people who pick a time and place and announce it and who know they can ban people they don't want at their events "meetup organizers." Boston Rationality has lost a little bit of my specific flavour of ambition focus, but we gained so much more from having lots and lots of organizers.
I want to abolish the word "organizer" from discussions about community.
By this I mean not Tabooing the word - I know perfectly well what "organizer" means. The problem is rather that sociological description can never be inert. Well, I suppose it could come close, if we on this English-language website were discussing some remote rainforest tribe that doesn't speak English or use the internet. But here we are explicitly talking about ourselves and our own community; the subjects of our discussion are also the main audience for these posts. So, the concepts we use "descriptively" will inevitably alter the things being described.
In this case, the concept of a "community organizer" imposes two hidden inferences on our social reality. Continued usage of the concept creates a world where these two assumptions are (or seem to be) true, but it doesn't have to be like this, and we will be better off if it isn't:
(Note for logicians: Strange as it may seem, these two propositions are logically independent, and so each should be discussed separately. In particular, it is not the case that "1 → 2". There is a possible world in which 1 is true but 2 is false, i.e. a world where communities don't exist at all!)
The false supposition that a community must necessarily have an organizer
A perennial complaint is that meetup groups tend to become overly reliant on one person in particular, such that the whole thing will fall apart without them (1, 2, 3). This motivates people in this position to seek out "apprentices" whom they can train up to play the same role in their absence. However (at least in my experience), this proves far more difficult than running the meetups in the first place. One feels overwhelmed by the amount of tacit knowledge that must be conveyed; one struggles with the sense that nobody else really "gets it" and that the trainees are merely playing along. And if by some heroic effort you orchestrate a smooth succession, it's only a matter of time before the same problem comes up again for the next person.
But in fact the problem had its origins long ago, when you first started calling yourself an "organizer" (or worse still, "the organizer"). This has a subtle but pernicious effect. Imagine if we applied this thinking to everyday life: I'm cooking breakfast, because I am a chef. I'm working out, because I am an athlete. I'm going out to dinner with friends, because I am a socialite and a gourmand. The order of implication becomes reversed in our minds - the "because"s should really be "therefore"s, but it feels like "because" from the inside. The reification of the labels thus creates an air of formidability about them, as if you're not allowed to do anything until some august body confers upon you the requisite identity badge.
So too with organizer. The very concept creates the problems which all that heroism will later be called upon to solve, by establishing a Schelling point that this particular person is going to do everything, and nobody else will. (And as the concept's namesake explains at length in The Strategy of Conflict, the initial Schelling point may prove very difficult to dislodge, despite what the participants may later say.) This will only serve to convince the organizer even more of their own indispensability, and any onlookers of the unenviable burden that the role represents.
But again, it doesn't have to be like this. One simple alternative is for the group to continually rotate the responsibility of running each meetup by selecting a different person at the previous meetup. Importantly, this responsibility also includes leading the discussion about who will be in charge of the next meetup. Once you've had your turn, you can sit back and relax for a while until you want to go again. Thus, there is no one person without whom the group will stop doing its thing; there is no need for anyone to be persistently lurking in the background "overseeing" the whole process like a poorly-functioning Rube Goldberg machine.
I have been in a couple of groups like this, one of which was the philosophy reading group I started (mentioned earlier). This group's meetings quickly settled into a rhythm. At the start of each meeting, the discussion leader would first invite suggestions for topics people want to discuss at the next meeting, and someone (normatively, whoever hadn't done this in a while) would volunteer to lead their topic of interest. Then the current leader would launch into a discussion on the main topic, and at the end would hand off the group's giant novelty hourglass (used for allocating speaking time) to the next leader. It would now be that person's responsibility to research their topic, email out assigned readings, and announce the date and time for the next meeting. And then the cycle would repeat.
This continued (with a few modifications) for almost 3 years. During that time, I took a several-months-long break from the group, but returned to find it still going strong. If you had asked me who "the organizer" of that group was, I would have struggled to answer.
The false supposition that a community can possibly have an organizer
This is a bit more speculative, but hear me out.
In all the talk about how meetup organizers should share their responsibilities and train up others on how to do what they do, there is one particular function served by organizers which is almost never mentioned. And yet, I would argue, this particular function is the single most important aspect of community organizing, perhaps even the only essential one. Everything else can be done in an ad hoc "do-ocratic" manner, but a community cannot (long) exist unless this specific thing is being taken care of in a coherent way on behalf of the entire group.
Can you guess what that thing is?
Answer: The function of banning people from the group.
The way this is handled will loom large over the organization's culture and color every interaction within it, and will thus determine everything else about the group's character. If it doesn't even make sense to speak of "banning" someone because all interactions are fundamentally opt-in on the part of all participants, then that means the group is a clique. If banning is the prerogative of a single person, then the group is a cult, or at least attempting to be one. Only in a guild can this responsibility be distributed amongst a large number of people.
But, if we're being honest, most "organizers" don't have what it takes to run a cult. It is only an exceptionally rare type of person that can inspire personal loyalty from a whole group of people; and whatever specific qualities such persons may possess, they are qualities not at all correlated with the practical skill of running meetups.
In practice, if the group persists in having an organizer (in this sense), the most likely result is not a cult, but rather a hollow shell that is too casual and superficial to be any type of community at all (and thus is not represented on the classificatory diagram). In a group like this, my contribution is neither needed nor wanted; I don't care about the group because it doesn't care about me.
("Liberty engenders particular hatreds, but despotism is responsible for general indifference." - Democracy in America, vol. 2 pt. 2 ch. 4.)
Insofar as such "superficial groups" can help me pass the time when I'm bored on a weekday night and go on meetup-dot-com looking for something to do, I have no problem with them per se. Not every group needs my personal devotion; sometimes it's okay to just take it easy and let someone else do all the work. But I don't want this to be the only game in town, such that people call it "community" because they know nothing else. Such groups will never enable the kind of deep connections that we need in great numbers in order to truly live in a society.