I've been pondering this problem for about two months. In the short term, I think there is a clear solution, but one that requires a measure of coordination between meetup organizers and Eliezer (who is promoting the meetup articles to the front page, which I think is a very good thing to do, given the importance of F2F for building a community capable of truly generating and retaining novel, true, and useful ideas).

I think a good solution would be to have a single meetup announcement always on the front page, with a list of dates and locations with links into the commenting area above the cut. Then top level comments to the article should be created about each meetup with details about location/time/topic, these are the thing to link to from above the cut. Conversation about specific meetups should occur as child comments off of the top-level-meetup-announcing-comments.

The benefit here is that it keeps critical dates and locations in the public eye, using much less screen space, but with a low barrier to entry (clicking on the link to the relevant comment tree) to find out more. Another benefit is the social cohesion among organizers and meetup attendees that would be likely to form if their discussions took place closer to each other.

The policy should be spelled out in the wiki with lots of advice and help on setting up a meetup and a template for what information needs to be nailed down to announce one. Once someone gets involved in organizing meetups, we should have a mailing list for meetup organizers to talk about what works and what doesn't.

There's a risk that this general policy wouldn't work, if fewer people see what they need to see in order to know that a meetup is happening that they want to attend. I would hesitate to change LW's software until we have a socially functioning solution. When I have set up meetups in the past in different places around southern california, I was initially surprised that most of the attendees have not been major and highly visible posters... being a "power user" on the website does not seem to strongly predict whether someone will be a "power attender"...

If any other organizers think something in this ballpark is a good idea they should PM me. If two people do this I will unilaterally set up a mailing list for us (or they can set one up and I'll join and promote it), then I will make sure that it is announced in a top level discussion article, and try to spur more discussion for a solution in the general ballpark of "more thinking and talking, less coding".

Whatever happens, it will require buy-in from Eliezer, because it is his promotion policy plus the lack of a better venue for meetup organizers which is responsible for the front page having so many meetups in the first place. If non-policy-educated people start meetup articles and he promotes them, then all the organizing and software in the world would not fix the problem so that the front page was cleaner and more relevant to a web audience.