Starting a LW meet-up is easy.

I have been thinking about a Seattle meet up for a while, as I think I have seen a few others here from the area. I recall seeing another poster say that they were from the University of Washington. (I'm an undergrad there)

I had a few questions: First off, I don't have enough karma to create a top-level post. Is the discussion board appropriate or can we figure out something for a top-level?

I might recall an old thread on "how to run a Lesswrong meetup" but I can't find it---did this exist?

What have been your favorite low-preparation activities and discussions?

Edit: Ok, I'm going to check up on booking a classroom at the UW, unless somebody has an appropriate restaurant they would recommend. Once I get everything figured out I'll make a post, but I'm thinking Saturday or Sunday afternoon before Valentine's day.

I need to bum some karma here. I want to start a Dallas / Fort Worth metro meetup. It's the largest metro in the US without an active LessWrong group, which is inexcusable!

Sundays at America's Best Coffee in Arlington at 1 PM starting this coming Sunday, 4/29/12.

A friend (Dvorak) and I are going to start a Houston meetup group, but he already runs a hackerspace and can't really take on more organizational duties. I'm a long time lurker, and would be mostly in charge of organizing the group. Unfortunately, I don't have the Karma to post on the discussion area. Can I beg an up vote or two off of someone?

Anna,

Thanks for writing this guide. Did you realize at the time that you were fulfilling my dreams? I needed this to share with several volunteers who wanted the assurance of having a short guide to read through. This will help a lot.

I'm starting a new Less Wrong meetup group in Atlanta, Georgia.

I created a google group to help get this organized, so join via the link below, or send me an email on gmail, I am hankx7787 there.

http://groups.google.com/group/atlanta-less-wrong-meetup-group

I haven't decided on a meeting place yet, but it will probably be in the midtown / Georgia Tech area, depending on who shows interest.

Some potential discussion topics:

Tell your rationalist success/failure stories, Basics of rationality, Cognitive biases, The sequences, Decision theory, Friendly AI, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Most major cities, and many minor ones, have some LW-ers.

I'd be interested in details. Does it hold only inside the US? Are there some statistics which can be used to estimate the chance of at least one person coming to such a meeting?

If the LW users could specify their coordinates in their profile, and that info be automatically processed to create a world map with some reasonable resolution telling the number of LWers in a given location (say, 100x100 km grid or so), that would be a useful application.

Hi, I'd like to start a meet up in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada on Wednesdays at 7pm at Whole 'lotta Gelata in Uptown Waterloo starting June 15. I'm not sure where to post that announcement (or how many LW people there are in the area), but here as a good a place as any to start...

According to these statistics, Helsinki has the eighth largest population of LW-readers out of all the cities in the world. Even if that number is for some reason bloated compared to other cities in the list, I think it'd be a good idea to try and have a meet-up here. So, is anyone else from around Helsinki interested? A couple of answers in this thread should be enough for us to settle on a date (I prefer a weekend in March) and post an announcement on the front page.

I'm almost certain this post will be useful, in that it will result in there being more LW meet-ups than there would otherwise have been. But, seriously, did anyone actually need the cotents? In order to arrange to meet some people who frequent a website you visit regularly, post something to the website saying that you'd like to meet them and where and when.

I'm genuinely curious as to why this will help (as I said, I'm sure it will). Is it because it explicitly gives people "permission" to go ahead and organise their own meet-up? Again, there can't possibly be any information in the post that any regular LW reader couldn't figure out for themselves.

On that note, are there any other LWers in Iowa? Specifically near Ames or Des Moines?

In another thread I was inquiring about a NYC meetup that seemed to be happening regularly. Someone posted a link but it went to a dead page on Overcoming Bias. Does anyone have some information about that?

Couldn't find a bangalore specific group so started a google group and a meetup group. Here are the links below. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/bangalore-lesswrongers.

http://www.meetup.com/Bangalore-LessWrongers-Meetup/. Have also scheduled a first meetup for Nov. 14th. Let's see how many turn up.

Is there a thread somewhere where I can gauge interest in a meetup in my area? I'm from Winnipeg, a medium-sized city in Canada, and I would be interested in starting a meetup group, but I honestly don't know if there's anyone in the city who reads LW other than me (we're not even on this list, for example). I think this is probably a concern for everyone outside major metropolitan areas--we don't want to put the effort in until we're at least sure that like-minded people actually exist in our vicinity.

Is there anyone who's had success with meetups in areas of similar size who would be willing to offer advice?