This is just an idea I had and wanted to write before I forget it. It is not urgent at all—too late for this round of meetups, enough time until the next one.
Very basic outline of how Meetups Everywhere works:
There’s a call for organizers, and I start collecting meetups in a spreadsheet. Most entries get there via a google form, though some email me or use other communication methods. The day before the announcement that spreadsheet is the single source of truth.
I turn the spreadsheet into a CSV and run two quick programs on it. One program gives me the plain text laid out like you see in the Astral Codex Ten substack. The other program gives me a JSON file with all the meetups.
I put the text layout into a draft for Scott. At this point, the preamble about how this works and which meetups me or Scott will attend gets added. I also do a bunch of formatting tweaks, since WYSIWYG editors can’t be automatically told which things to bold or turn into headings.
I put the JSON into a data import and commit that import to the ForumMagnum codebase (The code that runs the LessWrong website) for the LessWrong team[1]. Someone there double checks me, makes some tweaks, and tests the import against the LW database. Any meetups that didn’t exist already will get created, and control is given to the accounts matching the contact email address.
Scott posts the announcement to Substack, and LessWrong runs the import for real.
I quickly get emails and comments from people who realize their city doesn’t have a meetup and want to add one. Some of these people don’t have LessWrong accounts and don’t want one.
There are now at least three sources of truth; my spreadsheet (which I use for things like reminder emails or followup surveys), the ACX Substack post (which people look at for the big list of meetups) and individual events on LessWrong. As you correctly point out, this means that the three lists can get out of sync, causing people to miss meetups they’d otherwise like to know about. If I knew a way to keep all three in perfect sync I’d be highly motivated to use it, and I do my best to at least keep my spreadsheet and the Substack post synced.
The issue is that’s it’s hard to automatically pull from any one of these to any other, and they’re all useful. LessWrong has other events than ACX Everywhere; there’s a Book Swap that the Boston ACX group is running tonight for instance that should show up on LessWrong but shouldn’t be on the ACX Meetups Everywhere substack post. I want to get the emails of everyone running an ACX Everywhere meetup from September 14th to September 20th so I can send them a survey about their meetup within a week of them running it, which is easy with a spreadsheet and annoying from rich text. Individual events on LessWrong are the only part of this local organizers can edit, but I don’t get updates when those events are changed so I usually don’t notice when a date or location is changed.
An automatic way to go from my spreadsheet to LW and vice versa is definitely doable. This year my engineering time went into automatically checking how far meetups were from each other and trying to sort out LW’s new postgres database instead.
(I worry that came across as “nothing can be done and I’m annoyed people asked” which isn’t my intent. It’s a message from an engineer who just made a bunch of really dumb copy and paste errors while working through a process with too many manual steps annoyed at himself.)
Thanks. I see that it is automated even more than I expected, it’s just that syncing the later changes is difficult.
LessWrong has other events than ACX Everywhere
Wasn’t aware of this. I think this either requires some extra “flag” for the ACX Everywhere posts, or literally requiring the words “ACX Everywhere” in the meetup title. Then the exports would be possible.
Behold, the LW Community Map! Okay, granted right now it’s almost all ACX Everywhere events, but there’s Units of Exchange which isn’t. The automatically generated events do have ACX Everywhere in the title. . . but the manual ones don’t and there isn’t an extra flag.
Adding a flag is not technologically hard! (I assume at least. My local copy of ForumMagnum still refuses to load the map at all.) For the moment though, I’d have to sort through other kinds of events every time we pulled.
Thank you for your work. Enjoy the meetups!
This is just an idea I had and wanted to write before I forget it. It is not urgent at all—too late for this round of meetups, enough time until the next one.
Very basic outline of how Meetups Everywhere works:
There’s a call for organizers, and I start collecting meetups in a spreadsheet. Most entries get there via a google form, though some email me or use other communication methods. The day before the announcement that spreadsheet is the single source of truth.
I turn the spreadsheet into a CSV and run two quick programs on it. One program gives me the plain text laid out like you see in the Astral Codex Ten substack. The other program gives me a JSON file with all the meetups.
I put the text layout into a draft for Scott. At this point, the preamble about how this works and which meetups me or Scott will attend gets added. I also do a bunch of formatting tweaks, since WYSIWYG editors can’t be automatically told which things to bold or turn into headings.
I put the JSON into a data import and commit that import to the ForumMagnum codebase (The code that runs the LessWrong website) for the LessWrong team[1]. Someone there double checks me, makes some tweaks, and tests the import against the LW database. Any meetups that didn’t exist already will get created, and control is given to the accounts matching the contact email address.
Scott posts the announcement to Substack, and LessWrong runs the import for real.
I quickly get emails and comments from people who realize their city doesn’t have a meetup and want to add one. Some of these people don’t have LessWrong accounts and don’t want one.
There are now at least three sources of truth; my spreadsheet (which I use for things like reminder emails or followup surveys), the ACX Substack post (which people look at for the big list of meetups) and individual events on LessWrong. As you correctly point out, this means that the three lists can get out of sync, causing people to miss meetups they’d otherwise like to know about. If I knew a way to keep all three in perfect sync I’d be highly motivated to use it, and I do my best to at least keep my spreadsheet and the Substack post synced.
The issue is that’s it’s hard to automatically pull from any one of these to any other, and they’re all useful. LessWrong has other events than ACX Everywhere; there’s a Book Swap that the Boston ACX group is running tonight for instance that should show up on LessWrong but shouldn’t be on the ACX Meetups Everywhere substack post. I want to get the emails of everyone running an ACX Everywhere meetup from September 14th to September 20th so I can send them a survey about their meetup within a week of them running it, which is easy with a spreadsheet and annoying from rich text. Individual events on LessWrong are the only part of this local organizers can edit, but I don’t get updates when those events are changed so I usually don’t notice when a date or location is changed.
An automatic way to go from my spreadsheet to LW and vice versa is definitely doable. This year my engineering time went into automatically checking how far meetups were from each other and trying to sort out LW’s new postgres database instead.
I say the LessWrong team like it’s a single entity. RobertM took care of it this fall, and I appreciate him!
(I worry that came across as “nothing can be done and I’m annoyed people asked” which isn’t my intent. It’s a message from an engineer who just made a bunch of really dumb copy and paste errors while working through a process with too many manual steps annoyed at himself.)
Thanks. I see that it is automated even more than I expected, it’s just that syncing the later changes is difficult.
Wasn’t aware of this. I think this either requires some extra “flag” for the ACX Everywhere posts, or literally requiring the words “ACX Everywhere” in the meetup title. Then the exports would be possible.
Behold, the LW Community Map! Okay, granted right now it’s almost all ACX Everywhere events, but there’s Units of Exchange which isn’t. The automatically generated events do have ACX Everywhere in the title. . . but the manual ones don’t and there isn’t an extra flag.
Adding a flag is not technologically hard! (I assume at least. My local copy of ForumMagnum still refuses to load the map at all.) For the moment though, I’d have to sort through other kinds of events every time we pulled.