There are ACX meetup groups all over the world. Lots of people are vaguely interested, but don't try going to a meetup until I make a big deal about it on the blog. Since learning that, I've tried to make a big deal about it on the blog twice annually, and it's that time of year again.
If you're willing to run a meetup for your city, please fill out the organizer form.
Here’s the plan:
Interested organizers fill out the form by August 23rd.
The list of meetups gets posted around August 24th.
ACX Everywhere Meetups can take place anytime between September 1st and October 31st.
People enjoy each other’s company and keep having meetups throughout the year.
The form will ask you to pick a location, time, and date, and to provide an email address where people can reach you for questions. It will also ask a few short questions about how excited you are to run the meetup to help pick between multiple organizers in the same city. One meetup per city will be advertised on the blog, and people can email you if they have questions.
Organizing an ACX Everywhere meetup can be easy. Pick a time and a place (parks work well if you think there will be a lot of people, cafes or apartments work fine for fewer) and show up with a sign saying “ACX Meetup.” You don’t need to have discussion plans or a group activity. If you want to make the experience better for people, you can bring nice things like nametags/markers, food/drinks, or games. Meetups Czar Skyler can reimburse you for the nametags, markers, food, and drinks.
If you feel more ambitious, collect people’s names and emails if they’re interested in future meetups. You could do this with a pen and paper, or if you’re concerned about reading people’s handwriting you could use a QR code/bitly link to a Google Form.
Here’s a short FAQ for potential meetup organizers:
1. How do I know if I would be a good meetup organizer?
If you can put a name/time/date in a box on Google Forms and show up there, you have the minimum skill necessary to be a meetup organizer for your city, and I recommend you sign up.
Don't worry, you signing up won't randomly take the job away from someone else. The form will ask people how excited/qualified they are about being an organizer, and if there are many options, I'll choose whoever I think is best. (Or whoever Meetup Czar Skyler thinks is best.) But a lot of cities might not have an excited/qualified person, in which case I would rather the unexcited/unqualified people sign up, than have nobody available at all. This spreadsheet shows the cities where someone has filled out the form, updated manually after a basic check.
Lots of cities have existing meetup groups and we’ll probably prioritize them, but we always appreciate more options. Sometimes people assume their city is big enough that someone else will do it, nobody signs up before the announcement, and then afterwards people say they wish there was a meetup in their city. Beware the Bystander Effect!
If you are the leader of your city’s existing meetup group, please fill in the form anyway and say so.
2. How will people hear about the meetup?
You give me the information, and on August 24 (or so), I’ll post it on ACX. An event will also be created on LessWrong’s Community page.
3. When should I plan the meetup for?
Since I’ll post the list of meetup times and dates around August 24, please choose sometime after that. Any day September 1st through October 31st is okay. I recommend a weekend, since it's when most people are available. You’ll probably get more attendance if you schedule for at least one week out, but not so far out that people will forget - so mid September or early October would be best. Check your local calendar for holidays where people might be busy: If you're in the US, that probably means avoid Labor Day and Halloween.
4. How many people should I expect?
Last spring, meetups ranged from one person (just the organizer) to around two hundred. Meetups in big US cities (especially ones with universities or tech hubs) had the most people; meetups in non-English-speaking countries had the fewest. You can see a list of every city and how many people most of them got last time here. (If it’s blank, it means either no ACX Everywhere was run or we didn’t get a count of attendees in the post-event survey.`) Plan accordingly.
5. Where should I hold the meetup?
A good venue should be easy for people to get to, not too loud, and have basic things like places to sit, access to toilets, and the option of acquiring food and water. City parks and mall common areas work well. If you want to hold the meetup at your house, remember that this will involve me posting your address on the Internet.
6. What should I do at the meetup?
Mostly people just show up and talk. If you’re worried about this not going well, here are some things that can help:
Have people indicate topics they’re interested in by writing something on their nametag
Bring a list of icebreakers / conversation starters (e.g. “What have you been excited about recently?” or “How did you find the blog?” or “How many feet of giraffe neck do you think there are in the world?”)
Bring one extroverted friend who’s read the blog
In general I would warn against trying to impose mandatory activities (e.g. “now we're all going to sit down and watch a PowerPoint presentation”), but it’s fine to give people the option to do something other than freeform socializing (e.g. “go over to that table if you want to play a game”).
It’s also useful to have a signup sheet for a local mailing list or other way to announce meetups in the future, but this is optional both for the organizers and the attendees. Look at point 8 for more information about this. It can also be nice to include a checkbox on the signup sheet for adjacent local groups if your city happens to have those.
7. Is it okay if I already have an existing meetup group?
Yes. If you run an existing ACX meetup group, just choose one of your meetings which you'd like me to advertise on my blog as the official meetup for your city, and be prepared to have a larger-than-normal attendance who might want to do generic-new-people things that day.
If you're a LW, EA, or other affiliated community meetup group, consider carefully whether you want to be affiliated with ACX. If you decide yes, that's fine, but I might still choose an ACX-specific meetup over you, if I find one. I guess this would depend on whether you're primarily a social group (good for this purpose) vs. a practical group that does rationality/altruism/etc activism (good for you, but not really appropriate for what I'm trying to do here). I'll ask about this on the form.
8. If this works, am I committing to continuing to organize meetup groups forever for my city?
The short answer is no.
The long answer is no, but running more meetups seems like the sort of thing somebody should do. Many cities already have permanent meetup groups. For the others, I'll prioritize would-be organizers who are interested in starting one. If you end up organizing one meetup but not being interested in starting a longer-term group, see if you can find someone at the meetup who you can hand this responsibility off to.
I know it sounds weird, but due to the way human psychology works, once you're the meetup organizer people are going to respect you, coordinate around you, and be wary of doing anything on their own initiative lest they step on your toes. If you can just bang something loudly at the meetup, get everyone's attention, and say "HEY, ANYONE WANT TO BECOME A REGULAR MEETUP ORGANIZER?", somebody might say yes, even if they would never dream of asking you on their own and wouldn’t have decided to run things without someone offering.
9. Are you (Scott) going to come to some of the meetups?
I have in the past and had a lot of fun, but also found it pretty tiring. Since I expect to have less time and energy for travel, I’ll probably just attend the local one in Berkeley.
Again, you can find the meetup organizer volunteer form here. If you want to know if anyone has signed up to run a meetup for your city, you can view that here. Everyone else, just wait until 8/24 and I'll give you more information on where to go then.
10. What if I have other questions?
Skyler and I will read the comments here.
