meetup

A regular source of microformats events.

Weekly Meetup

The community and adoption have grown considerably over the last year, 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 weekly meetup!

By making this a regular (every Tuesday) 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 are held, sorted alphabetically:

London

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

Interested in general for London:

• Frances
• George Brocklehurst
• Patrick Griffiths
• ...

Possible locations:

• ...

Past London venues:

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

San Francisco

From having informally asked a few folks in the SF area and on IRC it seems Tuesdays at 6:30pm work best, with a rotating venue to keep it interesting.

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

• Osha Thai on 2nd st.
• 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
• ...

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

• 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

Other Cities

I encourage folks to organize meetup dinners wherever there is sufficient local critical mass. Once you start 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
• San Diego - User:EdwardOConnor
• San Jose (South Bay) - User:Kevin_Marks, Rohit Khare
• Montreal - User:Csarven

<entry-title>Weekly Meetups & Dinners</entry-title>

Organize a weekly 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-weekly-dinner-CITYCODE — e.g. 2009-01-06-weekly-dinner-sf in San Francisco, or 2009-01-06-weekly-dinner-ldn 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 Upcoming, Technorati, Google Blog Search and Flickr. These search on the event tag itself, so need to date portion updated.
        • Add yourself as an attendee
   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. 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 BrightKite, 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.

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