It’d be nice to have a better meetup system than current LW’s. I think I sketched my plan out earlier, but I might as well stick it here as well:
There are two basic sorts of meetups: one-offs and regular. (Austin’s “Welcome Scott Aaronson to Austin” party vs. Austin’s 1:30 Saturday meetup) Both have a location, a datetime, and an organizer. The regular meetups, in addition, have a repeat frequency and might have a link to somewhere else (maybe you arrange events on Facebook or Meetup.com). (And if we could somehow automatically import events from Facebook groups, all the better.)
Because of the similarity, those both seem like they could be the same data type to me. It also seems like the best way to display them is a map with a bunch of dots, probably colored by how far in the future they are (with something like “up to four hours ago” counting as now, so that meetups don’t disappear right when people are desperately trying to figure out what the address was again), with a UI that manages to map a bunch of dots on top of each other not horrible. (Maybe combine a dot view with a list view, like on Google Maps?)
One of the big motivations here is that the LW meetup map is pretty sad (sometimes the closest meetup was in Europe!) when I think there are actually a bunch of regular meetups. (It also seems like we should encourage any of the EA/rationalist/humanist/SSC/MIRIx/etc. groups to have their meetups on the map, maybe with different shapes for different types and filtering, to make it even easier to connect people. “Ah, there isn’t a LW meetup in my area, but there is an EA meetup!”)
For recurring events, it would be nice to have some assurance that the event is still happening. Recurring meetups which stop should disappear after a while, but confirmation of continued active meetups should (1) require minimal effort (2) not be easy to forget.
(1) and (2) are somewhat conflicting. Favoring (1) leads me to suggest something like LessWrong prompting the event creator once every six months: “Is this meetup still happening?” Favoring (2) leads me to suggest something which not only confirms that the event is still happening, but is valuable in itself, so that doing it can feel rewarding. For example, writing public event summaries. These could be short, and would give a highly visible sign to assure others that the meetup is still happening (and give them a bit of the flavor of it). It would also cause people to think about what they’re going to write, so that they have an open loop in their brain about writing the thing. It can be a rewarding habit. And, these summaries could be useful in themselves.
But, some groups would doubtless fall out of the habit.
For example, writing public event summaries. These could be short, and would give a highly visible sign to assure others that the meetup is still happening (and give them a bit of the flavor of it).
A thing I’d be worried about here is people being ashamed that their meetup is just a social club or something, or in general optimizing for doing things that sound good rather than are what the participants want to do.
What would be even cooler, but a lot more work, would be the ability to automatically populate from either Facebook events or Meetup.com events. Perhaps some people use other social networks in particular countries, but this would be the easiest way to ensure that the information provided is up to date.
I actually looked into the technologies for this in quite a bit of detail during my time at CEA. Creating a map for the meetups is quite doable, either with Google Maps or with Mapbox, and doesn’t require that much engineering effort.
The biggest obstacle I see here is both that Facebook is the tool of choice for creating events, and that it is really good at this in a way that we won’t be able to beat. Some kind of Facebook integration might save us here, or maybe fully focusing on reoccuring events is better.
An alternative would be to focus on “communities” instead of meetups. I.e. you can register a community on LessWrong, together with some metadata, such as Facebook groups, community greeter contacts, meetup locations, etc. Those communities are then mapped, and allow nearby rationalists to find those communities and engage with them. This generally reduces the amount of maintenance effort required by the local communities, and makes the system more flexible to integrate with whatever the local group uses as their event coordination tools.
An alternative would be to focus on “communities” instead of meetups.
This is the basic idea; a consideration to keep in mind is that there’s both passive new users (“hey, I just moved to Austin, are there any meetups nearby?”) and exciting events (“hey, we’re hosting a HPMOR wrap party!”), and you want to handle both cases well.
Now, maybe the thing to do here is have something like findable communities (basically, what’s on LW is a geolocation and a link to Facebook/whatever else you use) and then location-based pings (either based on IP or them letting us have their location), which the community owners can create. But I don’t really want LW to be prompting users to allow us access to their location all the time.
We should get cell-tower accurate positioning, which is usually good enough to determine the city and neighborhood you’re in (i.e. we should be able to distinguish between Oakland and Berkeley, but probably not central Berkeley and North Berkeley).
Rough googling suggests about 95% accuracy on city-level detection.
It’d be nice to have a better meetup system than current LW’s. I think I sketched my plan out earlier, but I might as well stick it here as well:
There are two basic sorts of meetups: one-offs and regular. (Austin’s “Welcome Scott Aaronson to Austin” party vs. Austin’s 1:30 Saturday meetup) Both have a location, a datetime, and an organizer. The regular meetups, in addition, have a repeat frequency and might have a link to somewhere else (maybe you arrange events on Facebook or Meetup.com). (And if we could somehow automatically import events from Facebook groups, all the better.)
Because of the similarity, those both seem like they could be the same data type to me. It also seems like the best way to display them is a map with a bunch of dots, probably colored by how far in the future they are (with something like “up to four hours ago” counting as now, so that meetups don’t disappear right when people are desperately trying to figure out what the address was again), with a UI that manages to map a bunch of dots on top of each other not horrible. (Maybe combine a dot view with a list view, like on Google Maps?)
One of the big motivations here is that the LW meetup map is pretty sad (sometimes the closest meetup was in Europe!) when I think there are actually a bunch of regular meetups. (It also seems like we should encourage any of the EA/rationalist/humanist/SSC/MIRIx/etc. groups to have their meetups on the map, maybe with different shapes for different types and filtering, to make it even easier to connect people. “Ah, there isn’t a LW meetup in my area, but there is an EA meetup!”)
For recurring events, it would be nice to have some assurance that the event is still happening. Recurring meetups which stop should disappear after a while, but confirmation of continued active meetups should (1) require minimal effort (2) not be easy to forget.
(1) and (2) are somewhat conflicting. Favoring (1) leads me to suggest something like LessWrong prompting the event creator once every six months: “Is this meetup still happening?” Favoring (2) leads me to suggest something which not only confirms that the event is still happening, but is valuable in itself, so that doing it can feel rewarding. For example, writing public event summaries. These could be short, and would give a highly visible sign to assure others that the meetup is still happening (and give them a bit of the flavor of it). It would also cause people to think about what they’re going to write, so that they have an open loop in their brain about writing the thing. It can be a rewarding habit. And, these summaries could be useful in themselves.
But, some groups would doubtless fall out of the habit.
A thing I’d be worried about here is people being ashamed that their meetup is just a social club or something, or in general optimizing for doing things that sound good rather than are what the participants want to do.
What would be even cooler, but a lot more work, would be the ability to automatically populate from either Facebook events or Meetup.com events. Perhaps some people use other social networks in particular countries, but this would be the easiest way to ensure that the information provided is up to date.
I actually looked into the technologies for this in quite a bit of detail during my time at CEA. Creating a map for the meetups is quite doable, either with Google Maps or with Mapbox, and doesn’t require that much engineering effort.
The biggest obstacle I see here is both that Facebook is the tool of choice for creating events, and that it is really good at this in a way that we won’t be able to beat. Some kind of Facebook integration might save us here, or maybe fully focusing on reoccuring events is better.
An alternative would be to focus on “communities” instead of meetups. I.e. you can register a community on LessWrong, together with some metadata, such as Facebook groups, community greeter contacts, meetup locations, etc. Those communities are then mapped, and allow nearby rationalists to find those communities and engage with them. This generally reduces the amount of maintenance effort required by the local communities, and makes the system more flexible to integrate with whatever the local group uses as their event coordination tools.
This is the basic idea; a consideration to keep in mind is that there’s both passive new users (“hey, I just moved to Austin, are there any meetups nearby?”) and exciting events (“hey, we’re hosting a HPMOR wrap party!”), and you want to handle both cases well.
Now, maybe the thing to do here is have something like findable communities (basically, what’s on LW is a geolocation and a link to Facebook/whatever else you use) and then location-based pings (either based on IP or them letting us have their location), which the community owners can create. But I don’t really want LW to be prompting users to allow us access to their location all the time.
Well, we have location by IP, which is rough but accurate enough for meetups. Only more detailed location requires permission.
Does that work on mobile?
We should get cell-tower accurate positioning, which is usually good enough to determine the city and neighborhood you’re in (i.e. we should be able to distinguish between Oakland and Berkeley, but probably not central Berkeley and North Berkeley).
Rough googling suggests about 95% accuracy on city-level detection.