Meetup Tips

Every so often I come across a cool addition to my bag of tricks for running meetups. These tricks often aren't complex or difficult, they're just things I hadn't previously thought of. One example is nametags: I didn't think to have any for the first meetup I ran, then I went to someone else's meetup and they had a roll of blank adhesive stickers and a sharpie. The next meetup I ran, I brought nametags.

This sequence is purely a collection of simple tips like that. If you're like me, you could probably get a decent amount of mileage out of just reading the titles. I've been spending a lot of time recently thinking about how to make meetups better and talking to people about how to make meetups better. Some meetup tips can take a while to think of for the first time, but can be learned and copied very quickly. The theme comic of this sequence is XKCD's Today's Ten Thousand.

I mostly care about rationality meetups, but these tend to be applicable to any kind of meetup you're involved in. That's not a bug, that's a feature.