Suggestion: Like the other regular threads we have, I propose a new monthly Meetup Report Thread, where people will describe what happened during their meetups. There are a few meetups every month, so there will always be something to write about. Top-level comments could be the names of the meetups, and below them would be comments related to the specific meetup.
This would overcome some trivial inconvenience. First, writing a comment is easier than writing an article, at least psychologically. Second, comments are allowed to be short. If you only want to describe the meetup in one paragraph, posting an article feels like too much (and we have Discussion cluttered by meetups already), but writing a comment of that length is okay. So you don't have to decide to write a long text to report about the meetup. But if one person writes one paragraph, and another person writes another paragraph or two, then we gradually get some kind of report. People who keep meetup notes publicly outside of LW could use this to post a hyperlink or maybe a short summary.
Not sure how other people feel about it, but I would be more likely to write a comment about a meetup I participated in or organized, than a whole article.
I like this idea; seeing as I have a meetup report to post, I just started a monthly Meetup Report Thread. Hopefully, people will do what you describe.
Looking at the discussion section recently, it seems like over half of the posts are meetups. I think it's really great that so many LessWrongers are able to get together and do interesting stuff. Looking at a lot of the topics, I often find myself thinking "I wonder what they ended up talking about." I looked at the meetups page and it looks like many give a description of the topic, but there is rarely any public followup. I also did a search which turned up surprisingly few post-meetup posts.
For example, this Los Angeles meetup from a few days ago about resolutions looked really interesting to me and I'm curious to hear what kinds of strategies were proposed and if there were any insights or anecdotes that came up that would be useful to share with those of us that couldn't attend.
I remember reading a meetup report back in November that told the story of the exercises they went through and it seemed to spark some good discussion. It even forced me to make a note to try some things on my own. This one was atypical in that it was very detailed and was a crosspost from a personal blog, but I feel like even short reports would give a chance for the rest of the community to chime in and give praise, suggestions, and feedback.
When I tried to think of reasons not to share what happened in meetups, I came up with a few potential factors: