meetup

A regular source of microformats events.

Regular Meetups

The community and adoption have grown considerably over the last few years, and news of adoptions (and once in a while challenges) come up frequently enough (at least once a week) that there are no shortage of new topics to discuss on a weekly basis. See purpose for more.

Organize a meetup!

By making this a regular (Tuesdays) event, people know it is happening regularly and can thus come whichever ones are convenient for them, and not worry about missing any one in particular.

Cities where weekly meetup events have been held:

San Francisco

See events for the latest meetups in San Francisco.

From having informally asked a few folks in the SF area and on IRC it seems Tuesdays at 19:00 (7pm, .79, .08Z, @125) work best, with a rotating venue to keep it interesting.

Bars, cafes, or restaurants that take orders "cafe style" or allow individual checks typically work best, because people often arrive and depart at different times during a microformats dinner, so that everyone doesn't have to be bottlenecked by a single check.

Additional suggested SF venues (suggester). Add your opinions and more suggestions:

• La Boulange du Dome
  • +1 lots of seating but get there early to save adjacent tables - Tantek 01:13, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
• Osha Thai on 2nd st.
  • +0 they require a group check. - Tantek
• Thirsty Bear
  • +0 ok food, often too crowded for a group to actually get seating, though we did hold a microformats dinner there last year somehow. I think John Allsopp sweet talked the hostess. - Tantek
• Mel's Diner
  • +0 hard to order healthy here, but the food mostly tastes good, and can probably get seating for a decent crowd at 6:30pm - Tantek
• Sugar Cafe
• Axis Cafe
• Naan & Curry on O'Farrell & Mason
• A La Turca Restaurant
• Henry's Hunan -- great for large groups in the evenings; the Natoma location in SoMa is open until 9PM. -Rohit
  • do they allow for "cafe style" or individual checks? - Tantek
• ...

Larger logo (e.g for event "header" images)

past SF venues

Past SF venues. We'll reuse these at some point I'm sure.

This section needs updating with dinners that have occurred since 2008-10-28.

Please update the following list by looking at events-2008 and more recent events, and add links (even just one more would help!) to dinners starting from the "since" date above, and update that date accordingly so that other contributors know where to continue updating from. Thanks!

• Chaat Cafe: 2008-06-24, 2008-07-22
• Crepes on Cole: 2008-07-01
• Westfield Food Court: 2008-07-08, 2008-08-19
• South Park (lunch) : 2008-07-15, 2008-09-23
• Chevy's SOMA: 2008-07-29
• Brickhouse Cafe: 2008-08-05
• Pancho Villa: 2008-08-12
• 21st Amendment: 2008-08-26, 2008-09-16, 2008-10-28
• Blondie's Pizza on Powell st: 2008-09-02
• Metreon Food Court: 2008-09-09
• Naan & Chutney on Haight st.: 2008-09-30
• Taylor's Automatic Refresher: 2008-10-14
• Mehfil: 2008-10-21
• 3rd Street Grill
• California Pizza Kitchen on 3rd
• Crepevine on Church

London

In London, Tuesdays at 7:30pm worked well.

Interested in general for London:

• Frances
• George Brocklehurst
• Patrick Griffiths
• Ketan Majmudar
• ...

Possible locations:

• ...

Past London venues:

• Wagamama at New Oxford St. & Bloomsbury St.: 2008-09-02
• The Princess at 76 Paul St.: 2008-09-09

Other Cities

Want a microformats meetup in your city? Organize one! Add your city and name to this list. Contact others from your city and organize a meetup. Once you do one, add another section for your city above this "Other Cities" section, and list suggested venues, past venues with links to meetup event pages etc.

There has been some interest expressed in organizing dinners in the following cities. Add yourself and/or contact the people listed and make it happen!

• Austin - irc Atamido
• Kansas City - Dan Connolly
• Montreal - Sarven Capadisli
• San Diego - User:EdwardOConnor
• San Jose (South Bay) - Kevin Marks, Rohit Khare
• Seattle, WA - Jeremiah Andrick, Colin Henry, Andy Woods

Organize a meetup

Anyone can organize a microformats weekly meetup or dinner!

At a minimum, all you need is:

1. At least one other person that commits to go (so at least you know you'll have a good conversation about microformats with at least one person).
2. A location

And organizing a weekly meetup requires you to at a minimum:

1. Pick a location
2. Announce it (location at 18:30, Tuesday) on various event sites and notification services like Twitter etc.

That's it. If you prefer a step-by-step list of instructions and details, to remove nearly all doubt, here you go:

1. Pick a location
   • Ask folks on IRC if they have any suggested locations.
   • Consider locations that are easy for a variety of people to transit to.
   • Consider a new location to keep it interesting.
2. Create the Events Pages
   1. Create specific event page on microformats.org wiki, follow the form YYYY-MM-DD-meetup-CITYCODE — e.g. 2012-01-03-meetup-sf in San Francisco, or 2012-01-03-meetup in London.
      • Copy the Weekly Dinner template code (below), and make the following edits:
        • Update dates and locations in the infobox at the top.
        • Update the tags list, adding the event specific tag for this event.
        • Update the URLs for Plancast, Facebook, Upcoming, H2VX, Google Blog Search and Flickr. These search on the event tag itself, so need to date portion updated.
        • Add yourself as an attendee
        • (For SF weekly meetup dinners, Matthew Levine has created a script to automatically generate wiki page source by parsing the hCalendar from the related upcoming event. To use this script, create an upcoming event first, then visit http://www.phusikos.com/event.php?upcoming_id=$upcoming_id, e.g. sample conversion link.)
   2. Create an upcoming event, summarizing the event and linking to the new wiki page you just created.
      • Just after creating the event, Upcoming gives you the option to "upload an official photo or image", click that link and upload http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3216/2836380076_9251390ded.jpg, making it the official photo for the event. Thanks to Cindy Li for the cool microformats meetup graphic!.
      • Add the event to the Microformats, Web2.0, Bay Area Web Geeks, Web Developers, Geek Dinners and Social Network Portability groups.
      • Update the wiki events page with Upcoming.org event tag (upcoming:event=00000000) you just created. You can copy and paste the previous meetup/dinner summary and change the relevant detail.
   3. Create a http://plancast.com/ page for the event, using the event's wiki page as the event URL.
   4. Create a http://facebook.com/ event as well
      • If you're an admin of the Facebook microformats group, go there first and choose the top right drop down arrow menu / "Use Facebook as … Microformats", and *then* create the event, then the event will be owned by the page and thus editable by any of the page admins. Use the image at the top of this page for the event image.
3. Announce it
   • Tweet the upcoming event
   • On the day of the event, post a reminder in the morning (to Twitter etc.), and again an hour before the event.
4. At the event, take a photo and post it to Instagram, Flickr etc.
5. Afterwards
   • Post a thank you note thanking those that attended, invite them to add their content to the wiki.
   • Update the wiki event page with details of discussions, photographs, blog links and so forth.

Event Template

{{DISPLAYTITLE:Microformats Meetup, San Francisco}}
__TOC__
One of several microformats [[meetup]] [[events]].

<div class="event-page vevent h-event">
== Details ==
;When
:<span class="dtstart dt-start"><time class="value">2009-MM-DD</time> from <time class="value">18:30</time></span> to <span class="dtend dt-end"><time class="value">20:30</time></span>
;Where
:<span class="location p-location">TBA</span>
;What
:<span class="summary p-summary">Microformats Meetup, San Francisco</span>
;Web
:<span class="url u-url">http://plancast.com/00000000</span>
:<span class="url u-url">http://facebook.com/event/00000000</span>
:<span class="url u-url">http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/00000000</span>

'''[http://h2vx.com/ics/microformats.org/wiki/events/2012-MM-DD-meetup Add this event to your calendar]''' http://www.boogdesign.com/images/buttons/microformat_hcalendar.png

== Weekly Meetup ==
<div class="description p-description">The microformats community has grown and stablized over the past few years, news of adoptions, new ideas and challenges come up frequently enough that there are no shortage of new topics to discuss on a weekly basis.

Come along, meet up with the microformats community in San Francisco 

In another city? Check out [[weekly-meetup#Other_Cities|Weekly Meetup: Other Cities]] and help organize one in your own city!</div>

== Tags ==
Use the following tags on related content (blog posts, photos, [http://twitter.com tweets]):
<!-- 
Event author: 
* replace "EVENTSPECIFICTAG" in the below text with a tag unique to the event, i.e. short name of event + (optional location) + (full-year or sequence number), e.g. BarCampBlock2007, FooCampLondon2007, SHDH22, SXSW2008, microformats-dinner-2012-MM-DD - update MM and DD to the Gregorian month and day of the month accordingly).
* replace "san-francisco" with the city where the event is taking place
* update the Upcoming.org event machine tag, too.
-->
tags:
<kbd class="tags" style="display:block">
<span class="category p-category">'''microformats-dinner'''</span> 
<span class="category p-category">microformats-meetup</span> 
<span class="category p-category">microformats</span> 
<span class="category p-category">san-francisco</span> 
<span class="category p-category">''microformats-dinner-2012-MM-DD''</span> <!-- This is your event-date-specific tag, update MM and DD to the Gregorian month and day of the month accordingly --> 
<span class="category">''upcoming:event=00000000''</span> <!-- Add/update this tag when you create the respective upcoming.org event -->
</kbd>

If you use Twitter, mention ''@microformats dinner''' in tweets about the event, and track them on [http://search.twitter.com/search?q=microformats+dinner Twitter Search].

== Attendees ==
Add yourself alphabetically sorted by family name if you plan on attending or attended this event.

* [[User:YourName|You]]
* …

== Notes ==
Topics Discussed:

* …

== Photographs ==
<!-- Event Author: Update the following URL to use this event's tag -->
* Search for photographs from this event on Flickr: [http://flickr.com/photos/tags/microformats-dinner-2012-MM-DD Photographs tagged microformats-dinner-2009-MM-DD] or for [http://flickr.com/photos/tags/microformats-dinner all photographs from microformats dinners].

''Add a photograph from this event here''.

== Articles and Blog Posts ==
Articles and blog posts following up on the meetup. Add a link to your post in the list below:

* …

<!-- Event Author: Update the following URL to use this event's tag -->
Also, find posts on this meetup on [http://blogsearch.google.co.uk/blogsearch?q=microformats-dinner-2012-MM-DD Google Blog Search] or [http://technorati.com/search/microformats-dinner-2009-MM-DD Technorati].

</div> <!-- End of @vevent -->

== Related Pages==
{{events-related-pages}}

purpose

In addition to providing a convenient forum for community members to get together once in a while and talk about the latest news about microformats, the weekly meetups serve many good ends.

Perhaps most importantly, weekly meetups really help communication and community. People that have met in person usually treat each other nicer online, thus very much help encourage everyone to be nice in IRC, mailing lists etc.

FAQ

Perhaps move to weekly-meetup-faq if this section gets too big.

general talk

• Q: Do you just talk in general about microformats?
• A: As there's been new people at every microformat meetup, there's almost always at least some general talk about microformats.

newcomers vs detail

• Q: How do you handle newcomers and at the same time get into detailed stuff?
• A: Usually there are multiple conversations going, so there's almost always a good conversation to participate in. Also, it helps everyone to talk with newcomers and get fresh perspectives, as well as practiced at effectively communicating what microformats are, benefits, how to use etc.

existing issues

• Q: Do you try to solve some existing issues?
• A: We have discussed existing issues in some past meetups. Often divisive or controversial topics are much easier to discuss and understand multiple perspectives on in person. For example, Ben Ward and Tantek have made some good progress on understanding various perspectives on value-excerption-brainstorming and are optimistic about making progress on related issues.

notes

• Q: Do you take notes?
• A: Everyone is encouraged to take notes and contribute aspects of conversations, topics etc. on the wiki page for the meetup.

related

• weekly-meetup-brainstorming to capture how to make the meet-up more exciting and give more practical use-cases
• events