I'm starting a group in Houston, but went ahead and recorded my response as it applies to my attendance at the Austin group.
Filled in. What will you do for places where there isn't a group organizer? There isn't anyone in Portland, for example; daenerys has done some of the work, but explicitly does not want to take the lead, and no one else has stepped forward.
Filled in the form, one of the things that keep me from attending is the distance I'd have to travel (Lund, Sweden to Berlin). Would be nice if fellow Swedes (or Danes) would like to meet up someplace closer.
However, any other feedback is also appreciated: good feedback, bad-but-not-dealbreaking feedback, and feedback from people who do currently attend.
The form is worded to make some answeres ambigous when answered by attendees for example the field "how often did you attend" is harder to interpret by you if it is mixed with numbers from regular attendees (which are likely hight but irrelevant for analysis).
Presumably you look only at the responses where 'Why do you currently not attend? ' is not left blank to identify the people who stopped attending.
That's my intent, yes. I'm also not particularly worried about collecting meaningful statistics from it, I just thought it would be useful to distinguish the classes "never came", "came a few times" and "came many times".
Filled in. This is a good idea. I would be interested in getting some feedback on the feedback, or seeing a writeup of some of the lessons or issues that come out of this.
Yes, if a group decides to change something about their meetup because of this, and gets more returning members (or current members report that it's more fun), I'd love to hear about it.
(I haven't looked closely at the results yet, I'll do that when they seem to have stopped trickling in, but it does look as though there's a fair amount of actionable feedback.)
It's fairly common for a LessWrong meetup group to get people attending for a week or two, and then never showing up again. Most of the time, there may not be a very interesting reason for that. But if someone did have a bad experience at a meetup, this would be valuable information that they'd be unlikely to volunteer to the organizers.
Thus, I've created a form to collect meetup feedback. The primary purpose is: if you have a local LessWrong meetup that you don't currently attend, we'd like to know why. However, any other feedback is also appreciated: good feedback, bad-but-not-dealbreaking feedback, and feedback from people who do currently attend. "Currently" is left up to your own interpretation.
Please fill in the form now. It should only take a couple of minutes. There are three short-answer questions and three longer ones, but all questions are optional. Better to give a quick response now than to indefinitely postpone writing a longer one.
I intend to publish the responses, both raw and with some appropriate-seeming amount of aggregation. But I'm going to strip out the "where is your meetup" field from the public data. This is so that you can give feedback to a group without worrying about embarrassing them publicly. I'll tell the organizers which responses applied to them, so that the feedback still reaches the right place. If you identify the meetup in a long-form response, I won't strip that out. I'll also strip out the "anonymous identifier" field, naturally.
If you do currently attend a meetup, but want to give feedback anyway, please do also fill in the form.
If you think your answer seems boring, don't let that stop you: for example, we'd like to know relative numbers of "came once, had a bad time" versus "came once, but it's usually not convenient", and we can't do that if the second group don't reply.
Once again: please fill in the form now! If you comment that you have done so, I will reward you with an upvote.