I took the advice of announcing a time and place and going there waiting for people to show up. It worked quite well in my small city. The sign "Less Wrong" was often enough to provoke a conversation in the coffee shop. And if no one showed up I had some free time to read or write or program.

Standard meetup advice was to announce you will be someplace at a particular time and see who shows up. (Bring a book in case it's no one.) Lots of people lurk and the activation cost for going to an already declared event tends to be lower than both scheduling an event and then going to it.

(I don't see that advice in the guide, so I'm reluctant to say it's still standard.)

I will hopefully be in New Zealand in January, just passing through. Keep me informed!

Aucklander student of logic and computation, reporting. I'm ready to meet when you are.

For what it's worth, I'm probably going to be in Auckland early next year, and I would come to the meetup.