Hi from Michael Vassar, the president of SIAI. With my wife and Singularity Summit co-director Aruna, I'll be traveling over the next few months to meet with rationality and singularity enthusiasts throughout the U.S. Specifically, I'll be in Boston from November 14-18, Philadelphia from December 1st to 10th and December 15th through January 4th, New Orleans from December 11th to 14th, Orlando on January 5th and 6th, Sarasota on January 7th through 12th, and in Tampa on the 11th if there is substantial interest in a meet-up there.
Please comment if you are interested in attending a meet-up in any of the cities in question and we can start planning.
I hope to find that there are thriving communities of rationalists in each of those cities already, but I'm traveling there to try to seed their precipitation from the local populace. If things go really well the groups and their respective cities will be on SIAI radar and who knows, maybe eventually there will be a Singularity Summit near Tomorrow-Land, a global catastrophic risk conference by the New Orleans levies, or a FAI extrapolation dynamics exploratory workshop near Independence Hall.
I am currently working on a google map API application which will allow LW/OB readers to add their location, hopefully encouraging those around them to form their own meetups. That might also make determining the next singularity summit location easier.
If there are any PHP/MySQL programmers who want to help I could def use some.
Neat idea! I missed this first time around, and so posted a comment on the open thread asking about creating some central regular-meetup info repo. Same general desire to connect people with meetups.
I know a little PHP (can create forms, WordPress themes/plugins and such, but I use other languages more often). Let me know how it's going and if I can be of any use.