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.
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.