Early Retirement Extreme Forums

I was wondering if forumites here would be interested in doing a digital meetup! Since most of us have gained a lot of experience with online meetings, I thought it could be nice to have an online meetup with you people as well.

As for the format, I'm still mulling it over. I see several options:

• We can do one big zoom/google meet meeting. This is fine with a few people, but becomes impractical when we have more than eight people
• We can do something with discord and have different voice channels, either to just to split the group into managable subgroups or topic ("investing", "woodworking", "semi-ERE", "general chat")
• We can do something fancy! I found https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hswzBzH ... anging-out, and he described several cool options. Most of them involve some kind of world where you can walk around and talk to people nearby you. Kind of like a real meetup. I created a room at https://topia.io/eremeetup-free-6707rkot3 (current password: lentils) to test it, and it seems to work quite well. PM me if you're willing to do tryouts with me.

Of course I'm open to other suggestions as well!

So, in summary:

1. Are you interested in some kind of online meetup?
2. Do you have any thoughts on what a good structure for this meetup would be?

I'm in!

This made me think of Cal Newport's idea of having "virtual office hours", a method for cutting down on the number of zoom meeting invites. On your calendar you have a time blocked out, Tuesdays 4-5p, or whatever, and if people want to talk to you they know they can pop in to your zoom meeting. Maybe this could be a sort of standing thing, once a month there's an open ERE zoom meeting or whatever. Just throwing out ideas. If Jacob shows up it could be like we can play podcast host , although maybe he's had enough of that recently.

eta Topia is neat!

I'm theoretically interested in this, as long as it doesn't clash with anything else I'm doing.

I would consider it, sounds fun. Do have some reservation, would prefer to wait until after I've departed the working life.

I think the concept is a good one. I'm interested but wary. Some thoughts:
- Depending on what format you end up with consider having some strong moderation. I've done quite a few online meetups now and sometimes they work out organically with everyone getting to talk. Other times they have been dominated by one loud extrovert who enjoys having a captive audience and people slowly sign off once they realize they aren't going to get to participate. Think pareto distribution applied to talking time.
- On the other end of the spectrum, I have also experienced lurkers making people uncomfortable. I don't want to get to know iDave with 25 people watching who won't introduce themselves.
- For me as a person who is trying to remain anonymous I see a very small upside (interacting with some online friends in a realtime format) with some very large downsides (1. I am spotted by someone else from my real life and my interest in FIRE is exposed or 2. my real life gets connected with my forum account and my ERE account is no longer anonymous). I'm not very concerned about 1 but 2 is a serious concern.
- There have been a couple of attempts at text chat ERE channels. One of those could be found and rebooted as another way to talk in realtime that avoids my concerns above.

I always think of concerns and downsides, it's just my personality. Take the above with a grain of salt.

I like the idea (I am in), but from experience, I find these kinds of things more interesting if there is some kind of a collective goal/objective, rather than just meeting up just for the sake of meeting up.

I'm interested. A Zoom meet up with a topic and a moderator to handle calling on people and using the hand raising function can be good even with greater than 8 attendees. I'd also be interested in a discord with voice channels depending on interest for the actual meet up format.

All right! I count 4 yes, 1 yes if no clash, 1 wary yes and 1 yes but prefer later.

I think if we are with 7 we can simply use zoom/google meets/jitsi. Wrt to your comments:

• Office hours: I'm not sure yet. We can always try it, but I think it's also nice to keep it a bit special and to chew a bit longer on the stuff you talked about. We'll see how the first one goes! Jacob is welcome of course, but I can imagine that he'd prefer to not be the 'main attraction', but just one of the people participating in a conversation.
• Moderation/lurkers: I'm fine with moderating if needed, but I hope it'll mostly be an organic conversation. With a group small enough, I don't think lurking will be too much of a problem (then again, even in real convo's some people prefer to listen more). If we become to big, I'd prefer to switch to something like discord or topia.
• Privacy: this is hard to solve completely, since you have to assume everything *could* be recorded. A partial mitigation could be to use an alias (John Doe) and don't use a webcam (or wear shades and a baseball cap).
• Text channels: this is also an option, but I personally enjoy having spoken conversations more
• Collective goal/objective: I agree that we shouldn't just meetup to play among us and crack jokes. A main objective could be to discuss our various ERE strategies or thoughts on specific topics relevant to FI/ERE (woodworking, side hustles, investing, repair skills, climate change, ...). I'd prefer to have some general theme instead of a very stringent agenda to make it a focused but relaxed gathering.

I'll kick off an PM chain this Sunday. If other forumites want to join, feel free to post your interest here or PM me directly!

I like that idea of it being a super informal show and tell. No real structure, but have at least one thing to contribute - show off something you built, scavenged, a web of goals epiphany, hustle, etc.

i'm in

Based on doodle input, a date and time was selected! Saturday June 12th, from 19:00 - 21:00 Amsterdam time (13:00 - 15:00 New York and 10:00 - 12:00 Los Angeles).

If you're interested in joining, feel free to PM me and I'll send you the details.

We had the meeting last Saturday and it was pretty rad! Seven people said they would attend, three did (including me). We talked about a myriad of topics, including permaculture, systems thinking, how to best 'spread the word' and if that is even a thing you should want.

It was a nice, casual (but still deep) chat and I look forward to doing it again! I'll fire up this thread again in a couple of months for a round 2. If someone else wants to take initiative before that, feel free.

Nice to hear, though also a bit disappointing that so little showed up. I'm interested, but am too busy at this point in time. Perhaps towards the end of the year if there will still be a follow up at that time.

Bummed I missed it, but glad to hear it went well! Summer is always tricky as people tend to be busier. And in 2021, people are less likely than before to pass on a meatspace meeting than a virtual meeting. Looking forward to joining for the next one.

I missed this thread but am now subscribed. Hopefully I can make the next one.

Just saw this thread. If you do end up doing it again, I’d love to join as long as you’re ok with relative newbies to ERE.