One of the most valuable services the Less Wrong community has to offer are the meetup groups. However, it strikes me that there isn't a lot of knowledge sharing between different meetup groups. Presumably there's a lot that the different groups could learn from each other -- things that can be done, experiments that have or haven't worked out, procedural and organisational tips. Hence this post. Please go ahead and write a summary about your local less wrong meetup below:
- What meetups do you run?
- What's worked?
- What hasn't?
- How is the group organised?
Dinner meetups
We have a monthly meetup at an RSL in Sydney -- we've found this is a good venue, as people who want to can get food and drinks, but not everyone needs to. At a cafe there is more pressure to have to make purchases over time if you're taking up their floor space.
This was the first meetup we ran when the Less Wrong Sydney group resumed meeting -- at first we ran them with a focus on group discussions, and talking about a particular topic, but we found that often a topic was more of a reason for people to stay away, than for people to come. With the advent of the dojos, there wasn't as much pressure for this to deliver on applied rationality, and so it has turned into more of a group discussion space.
We're currently in the middle of an experiment of trying to drive people to these meetups from a meetup.com group -- if people seem interested, we can then invite them to come along to the dojos also.
To save others from Googling, the RSL appears to be Australia's Returned and Services League, which licenses clubs as meeting venues, originally for veterans but now also for guests.