How to run a meetup

Here are some useful resources on meetup organizing:

  • Priya Parker’s book The Art of Gathering. This book covers all aspects of holding an event and is great food for thought. I recommend it to many people I meet, but especially to anyone involved in community organizing.

  • How to Run a Successful Less Wrong Meetup, which was published in 2012. While this handbook is somewhat outdated (for example, the ‘rationality community’ writ large is 10-100x bigger now), it’s still a good resource that covers all of the basics.

  • The Meetup Advice sequence by Mingyuan (currently a work in progress), which also includes useful posts by other authors. Mingyuan has also written up some more abstract thoughts about rationality meetups here.

  • The Meetup Cookbook by Maia, who along with her spouse has run meetups in two different major US cities for nearly a decade. While Maia’s meetups are primarily social and yours may not be, the driving idea — that you can reduce the amount of effort needed to run your meetup while still maintaining high quality — can be useful to just about everyone.

  • Sky’s Meetup In A Box sequence, much like the Cookbook, is intended to provide ready-made, low-effort meetup activities for organizers. It emphasizes meetups that can be run like a board game, by getting people together and then reading the directions.

 
 

On burnout

The most common concern organizers bring up is that they’re worried that their meetup would stop existing if they stopped putting in effort. This can be a major problem if you are planning on moving away, or if you just become busier for whatever reason (e.g. starting a family). The task can feel thankless and lonely, and eventually lead to burn out.

Raymond Arnold, who led the NYC community for several years, has two great posts on avoiding this kind of bad outcome: