I would change the order of role descriptions section and the following section on starting a group.
This occurred to me as well. I changed it for the (as-yet non-public) version 4 of the document.
The "retaining members by being a social group" subsection is too long and has several paragraphs on maintaining a healthy discussion structure rather than the social aspect. Maybe splitting the subsection could help?
Hmm. Is three pages really too long? I felt that discussion about how to keep the atmosphere pleasant and keeping the discussion structure healthy would be a natural fit for a section that says you should aim to make people friends with each other - since those are sort of requirements for people becoming friends in the first place.
It is obviously great to aim to have a group which is "doing something" and is not just purely social (although nothing wrong with that either!) but I would caution against too much formality at the early stages of a meetup group. A pleasantly friendly group can be equally efficient, I believe, but it takes time to develop into such a group, and formality may be counterproductive. (By formality I mean things like prescribed roles, forcing a structure onto meetups early on, quenching discussions that "stray away" from an initial topic etc.) Allowing people to bond first and then increasing the "productivity" of the group by some agreed formalising changes may be better.
This is an excellent point, thanks. I added the following to the "The first meetup" section (though I'm not sure whether that was the best place for it):
"Excess formality can be counterproductive, especially in the early stages of the meetup group. One may be tempted to actively do things such as prescribing roles, forcing too much structure to the meetups, killing discussions that “stray away” from the initial topics, and so on. The risk is that this may feel off-putting or even silly to people who would have preferred to start off more informally. It may be better to let the participants bond first and then agree upon some formalized changes later on."
How to Run a Successful Less Wrong Meetup is a guide that I've been working on, based on lukeprog's instructions, for the last week and a half. As it says in the beginning:
Here's the table of contents:
This is a draft version, so feedback would be most welcome, particularly on things like:
The link above will take you to a Google Docs copy of the document, with the ability to add comments to the draft. Feel free to comment on the guide either as traditional LW comments or by attaching comments to the document itself: both are fine.
EDIT: Here's the most recent version, though without the commenting ability.
EDIT2: The most recent version as of April 11th, with commenting enabled.
EDIT3: First non-draft version; see also this thread.