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?
We tried one of these in LA, and while I wasn't there, I heard people liked it - but it's a lot of work to run, and so it only happened one time. Part of that is that it was much longer, and part is that finding a venue was hard.
Venues are definitely a problem -- we're lucky enough to have a relatively central humanist group who let us hire out their meeting space once a month, but occasionally it has been difficult to scramble to find an alternative.
I wonder if there'd be some value in having a list of suggested ways to find a venue for people organising meetup groups.