Thank you for writing this! It had a lot of useful suggestions. (E.g. I’ll take away from this post that I should also publicise our meetups on Facebook.)
I’m not sure whether “30min a month” translates that well to the time when you’re just starting as well as smaller cities than London.
I’ve recently started a meetup in Frankfurt (we had one so far and the next is already planned) and I think I’ve invested about five to ten hours already, not even counting the meetup itself. Those went into creating a meetup account and getting familiar with the website, creating a mailinglist and curating it, preparing a talk for the first meetup, writing texts to be inviting, etc, then opportunity costs (I couldn’t manage to organize the LW meetups as I usually do, so I was trying to get other people to do that and so on).
But for me it’s not so much the time as the mental energy which is the problem here, in the sense that it grabbed a lot of my attention. This might be my own personal problem that others don’t have, but I don’t know what to do about it.
The other point is that I live in a much smaller city where “just post an event” doesn’t seem to work very well, when I look at my experience organizing the local LW meetups for the past 1,5 years. To get people to show up, I need to think of an interesting programme that is the biggest time sink. For what it’s worth, maintaining the LW meetups costs me a lot less time than starting EA meetups costed me.
Whenever I am in London and visit LW or EA meetups, I can see how it can easily work differently just by the fact that you have lots of people showing up—they’ll always find something interesting to talk about in smaller groups. In a smaller city we have fewer attendees and they need more deliberate entertainment.
In general, I’m strongly in favor of encouraging people to start meetups, I wish I had started ours sooner. A clear outline of what to do can help a lot with that!
I want to add that having organized the second and third meetup which were quite successful, it shows it actually doesn’t require many resources to keep the minimum level up.
I have a similar experience for EA in the Netherlands. My post may sound somewhat negative, but I decided to continue writing it to reduce possible bias towards success stories.
We are a very small meetup group, and the most frequent attendees do not even live in the same city—the density of people interested in EA is very low. We meet near the train station in Utrecht, which is a city in the centre of the country. Convincing people from your local network to a meetup in another city is difficult (I managed twice). The large travel cost, low popularity of donating money and unfamiliarity with EA are big thresholds for potential attendees.
I always have great time during the meetups and met really awesome people, got a lot of new insights, and some people reported the social support has been useful.
Mental energy cost is significant for me too. I don’t see this as something really bad.
My rough guess is that in a city where very few people are already interested in EA, organizing a meetup is probably not worth it (depending on how much you value your time). EA Netherlands falls below this threshold, although we decided to keep going. Alternative EA or LW events do not exist at reasonable travel distance. The nearest are Frankfurt for EA and Brussels for LW.
Thank you for writing this! It had a lot of useful suggestions. (E.g. I’ll take away from this post that I should also publicise our meetups on Facebook.)
I’m not sure whether “30min a month” translates that well to the time when you’re just starting as well as smaller cities than London.
I’ve recently started a meetup in Frankfurt (we had one so far and the next is already planned) and I think I’ve invested about five to ten hours already, not even counting the meetup itself. Those went into creating a meetup account and getting familiar with the website, creating a mailinglist and curating it, preparing a talk for the first meetup, writing texts to be inviting, etc, then opportunity costs (I couldn’t manage to organize the LW meetups as I usually do, so I was trying to get other people to do that and so on).
But for me it’s not so much the time as the mental energy which is the problem here, in the sense that it grabbed a lot of my attention. This might be my own personal problem that others don’t have, but I don’t know what to do about it.
The other point is that I live in a much smaller city where “just post an event” doesn’t seem to work very well, when I look at my experience organizing the local LW meetups for the past 1,5 years. To get people to show up, I need to think of an interesting programme that is the biggest time sink. For what it’s worth, maintaining the LW meetups costs me a lot less time than starting EA meetups costed me.
Whenever I am in London and visit LW or EA meetups, I can see how it can easily work differently just by the fact that you have lots of people showing up—they’ll always find something interesting to talk about in smaller groups. In a smaller city we have fewer attendees and they need more deliberate entertainment.
In general, I’m strongly in favor of encouraging people to start meetups, I wish I had started ours sooner. A clear outline of what to do can help a lot with that!
I want to add that having organized the second and third meetup which were quite successful, it shows it actually doesn’t require many resources to keep the minimum level up.
I have a similar experience for EA in the Netherlands. My post may sound somewhat negative, but I decided to continue writing it to reduce possible bias towards success stories.
We are a very small meetup group, and the most frequent attendees do not even live in the same city—the density of people interested in EA is very low. We meet near the train station in Utrecht, which is a city in the centre of the country. Convincing people from your local network to a meetup in another city is difficult (I managed twice). The large travel cost, low popularity of donating money and unfamiliarity with EA are big thresholds for potential attendees.
I always have great time during the meetups and met really awesome people, got a lot of new insights, and some people reported the social support has been useful.
Mental energy cost is significant for me too. I don’t see this as something really bad.
My rough guess is that in a city where very few people are already interested in EA, organizing a meetup is probably not worth it (depending on how much you value your time). EA Netherlands falls below this threshold, although we decided to keep going. Alternative EA or LW events do not exist at reasonable travel distance. The nearest are Frankfurt for EA and Brussels for LW.
What is LW?
Lesswrong
LessWrong, a community dedicated to improving “rationality”. It has a decent overlap with the EA community.