Sometimes proposing a date/time is helpful because it gets people into a more practical mode and starts off the discussion by having people say "yes that works for me"/"no I am busy then"
Agreed; that probably works best when you already know there are a lot of Lesswrongers in your area, which isn't the case in Paris (there were two of us at last meetup, so rescheduling to double attendance makes sense).
There seem to here have been a fair amount of meetups posted with no times, and then re-posted with added times or slightly adjusted wording. Perhaps Google Reader is the problem (how I follow the top-level), but not only are there a lot of meetups (which has been talked about quite a bit lately), but these changed post titles show up as two separate entities. (Example)
For planners, please think carefully when announcing your meetup and post the time and the title you want on the first try, if possible. Thanks.
Perhaps a standard title format could be proposed that handled such things?
Or something like that? This would have the benefit of helping planners not forget anything important, but might have the added benefit that if a future implementation of some sort makes a meetup page or auto-scraped list of happenings, a standard format will make this easier.