Great post!
Based on this post, I added a "Pioneering new meetups" section to the most recent (currently non-public) version of the meetup guide. It now reads as follows:
Pioneering new meetups
Then I had an idea of an experiment. I was travelling to Budapest last week for 3 days to visit my family and I thought that I would simply try to organise a meetup there. In the worst case, I would spend a couple of hours in a cafe reading a book. My guesstimate was that 3-4 of my friends (whom I reminded several times) and maybe 1-3 people I don't actually know would turn up.
I was surprised to find that 14 people attended the meetup, two of them travelling all the way from Bratislava to Budapest. We spent almost 4 hours in a fantastic discussion, a mailing list was created, and a second meetup is happening tomorrow. My experiment produced a result I didn't expect. -- Alexey Morgunov, Setting up LW meetups in unlikely places: Positive Data Point
If you are traveling to a major city that doesn’t yet have an active meetup group, you may wish to try creating one there during your visit. This is especially the case if you’re already an experienced meetup organizer or participant, but you shouldn’t let a lack of experience deter you if you aren’t.
To pioneer a new group, start by picking a location and announcing the meetup on the site, as if you’d do when starting a meetup in your hometown. When you post the notice, be sure to mention the fact that you’re only visiting and won’t become a regular attendant - people are more likely to show up if they think they won’t get an opportunity to meet you again anytime soon. If you are not already familiar with the area, you may have to rely on someone local to choose the actual site of the meetup. Try to avoid a situation where you get stuck waiting for somebody to recommend a site, or for the locals to decide on the best place, however - you’ll want to make sure that you actually confirm the location of the meetup in time. In the worst case, search for a list of cafés in the region and just pick one that looks nice. Near the center of the city is usually optimal, but if you don’t know the city well and are worried about getting lost, near the place where you’re staying is better than nothing.
It might be that you’re unlucky and won’t get any people to attend. But if you do get participation, you don’t want the meetup to remain just an isolated incident. Try to identify one or two people who seem particularly active and talk to them about organizing future events. Get people’s e-mail addresses and create a mailing list. Use it to help with choosing a time, a venue, discussion topics and activity ideas for the next meetup. Announce it on the website. Get the chosen organisers to help you and gradually let them do it. Point them to this guide if they don’t know of it already. With some luck, the group will live on without you.
Also based on this post, I added the following to the "The First Meetup" section:
People may not know what to expect from a Less Wrong meetup, so you’ll probably need to lead the discussion in the beginning. Some questions which might be suitable for being discussed in the first meetup are:
- How did you become interested in Less Wrong?
- Which particular aspects of the range of Less Wrong topics are you the most interested in?
- How does being a Less Wrong reader translate into your regular life?
Meeting fellow LessWrongians in meat space is a great opportunity to participate in interesting discussions and to make new friends. But there aren't that many places in the world (hopefully, yet) where regularly active meetup groups exist. Here is a story of how I realised that setting up LW meetup groups is much easier than I thought; and an idea of an approach to help build more LW communities in real life.
When I co-organised the LW meetup group in Cambridge, there was already a group of friends irregularly discussing LW related topics. Strangely, it took us some time before we actually realised that we should announce a meetup on the LW website. Once we did that, our group exploded in numbers and we have had regular meetups almost every week.
Of course, Cambridge, UK is a place where we expected to be successful in forming a meetup group. It is small and the concentration of usual target audience of LW is extremely high. I thought we were lucky with the location that creating a regular meetup group proved to be so easy.
Then I had an idea of an experiment. I was travelling to Budapest last week for 3 days to visit my family and I thought that I would simply try to organise a meetup there. In the worst case, I would spend a couple of hours in a cafe reading a book. My guesstimate was that 3-4 of my friends (whom I reminded several times) and maybe 1-3 people I don't actually know would turn up.
I was surprised to find that 14 people attended the meetup, two of them travelling all the way from Bratislava to Budapest. We spent almost 4 hours in a fantastic discussion, a mailing list was created, and a second meetup is happening tomorrow. My experiment produced a result I didn't expect.
One data point is not sufficient to draw conclusions, but this result suggests that further experiments should be tried. It may just be that many cities have reached a critical number of active LessWrongians and regular meetups can start happening. Which is trivially of positive net effect.
Therefore, I would encourage people to consider getting out there and trying to set up meetup groups in their areas. But since this requires individuals actually willing to assume the role of organisers, this may not be as easy as it sounds. Fortunately, there is a document currently in development that aims to provide some help with this: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/bak/draft_how_to_run_a_successful_less_wrong_meetup/. But there might be something else that can be done - a pioneering approach.
If you have some experience of attending/organising LW meetups, next time you are in a different city (even if only for a couple of days!) try to devote a couple of hours to organising a meetup there. Be a "pioneer". Here is what I learnt from the meetup in Budapest: