Whenever a bunch of people who may never have met get together, it is nice if there is an anchor-point near the entrance to gather around and do introductions.
If someone uses the pen + paper to start an attendance sheet, by the end of the meetup there is list of participants that anyone can see and copy.
Hosting a good meetup tends not to be free. Anticipating between one and two dozen people, I purchased approx ninety dollars worth of food/beverages. Also, the fee to use meetup.com was ten or fifteen bucks. Some people contributed to this event by bringing additional food, while others were invited to donate money - USD or steem - to share these cost. Three dollars made it into the donation jar by the end of the night, and I haven't checked to see if any steem or SBD has been donated. Just about all the food got eaten and everyone had a great time, though, so I consider the cost of hosting this event money to be money well spent.
Here's some of what I picked up to get things started.
As you can see, I didn't skimp out. As participants arrived, the pile of stuff to eat grew, and before long the area was filled with lively conversation.
About twenty people rotated through a few rooms where everything from steemit tips to social justice to blockchain philosophy was considered at length.
New users began happily signing up for steemit.
Incidentally, one person had a problem with the account sign-up process. The password that should have made this person's active key visible did not do so, but their posting key worked fine.
Overall, how did the meetup go?
I think it went great. The idea of hosting a meetup to talk about a social media website would have sounded absurd to me six months ago, but the thing came together organically and somehow just made sense. I've never seen so many new-to-the-game people get so excited about anything crypto-related. And most of those who showed up seemed to do so because they were inspired and intrigued by steemit.
Notably, @anthonyjerrigo made good on his promise and actually took a bus from Chicago to Minneapolis to attend this meetup. He and his girlfriend arrived via an uber from the bus station, were awesome, and then went back to the bus station to make the return trip to Chicago.
By the end of the night,
A handful of dedicated steemians got together for a focused discussion on how to: (a) bring better and better content to steemit, (b) do our part to connect the 3,112,117 people in our Twin Cities with this social media revolution, and (c) assert our community's ethics and values in a respectful manner on steemit no matter what ignorant, annoying, or abusive hogwash might come our way via trolls and scammers.
I do not want to say too much more about what happened as others may be posting about their experience of this event, and I don't want to steal anyone's thunder.
Final thoughts:
For a largely unadvertized meetup, scheduled just a week in advance to take place on a Monday night, there was a pretty good turnout. I had a blast, and imagine that this event laid the groundwork for a much larger and more organized meetup in our city in October. #hellominneapolis
Great time last night. I watched the political theater dumpster fire this morning and had no regrets I decided to come to the Meetup. Thanks for hosting @mada!
Thanks for showing up with food to share and bringing your friends along!
I'm thinking I will continue avoiding that particular dumpster fire and just wait for the south park version of the debates to come out.
It looks like it was a blast, I'll make one of these eventually, I love Minneapolis.
Cool!
Yaaas! Such a great time and lively discussion throughout! Thanks again for hosting. :)
My pleasure. Hanging out with a bunch of creative, insightful people was a far better way to spend the evening than watching the presidential "debate" - and I woke up today feeling confident that we can pull off something equally engaging and ten times bigger in the near future.
Thanks everyone for the friendly informative welcome to the Steemit community.
Thanks for hosting us, @mada! I particularly enjoyed listening to that discussion toward the end of the night about how Steemit might cope with the issue of plagiarism, and the possible legal ramifications of profiting in Steem-dollars from posting plagiarized content. Looking forward to October!
Sorry I couldn't make the first meetup. I am so glad it went so well with all of you creative people!
Thank you so much Mark! It was such a pleasure meeting all of you :)
The feeling is mutual, my friend.
This post has been linked to from another place on Steem.
Minneapolis Meetup Recap and Chicago Meetup Inception by @anthonyjerrigo
[video teaser] Minneapolis Steemit Meetup №1 by @lovejoy
Learn more about linkback bot v0.4. Upvote if you want the bot to continue posting linkbacks for your posts. Flag if otherwise.
Built by @ontofractal