Meetup Input/Brainstorm | Evangelists
Hey everyone, the purpose of this document is to have an asynchronous discussion around Meetups. High-level, we see that most projects like ours do them and support them to varying levels. We’re interested in what you, as Evangelists, think of them and their value or potential value specifically in the Blockstack community. 

Worth a quick look:


Open Questions

(feel free to add your own directly or make comments! Feel free to just answer the questions that resonate most with you, by no means do you need to fill in each one)


Do you find Meetups a useful tool in building local community?
Yes, Meetups are very useful to spread out Blockstack and meet new peers.

Meetups are an excellent way to find or help found local communities wherever you are.


Do you think it’s important Blockstack has a strong Meetup showing, generally? (as in, a potential signal as to the success/activity of the project)
Yes, especially now when Blockstack is growing. The numbers (members, groups and countries) show Blockstack grows very fast - 8 weeks ago we have less than 1000 members, 10 groups on 5 countries and right now we have 4190 members, 25 groups on 13 countries.

Whether the chosen platform is Meetup.com or not, being able to point to hundreds of locally organized communities around your technology is a great data point for a project’s success. Other open source communities I’ve been a part of spend considerable effort cultivating local communities to encourage continual growth of their developer pool.


Are Meetups something you immediately think of when you contemplate building/supporting your Blockstack Community? Why/why not?
Yes, I built my Meetup before joined with Blockstack Meetup Pro. For answer to the why question, many people join our community because they see us on Meetups.


In your opinion, should Blockstack PBC be putting resources toward supporting the creation of more Meetup Groups and pushing for more events to be happening?
Yes, definitely. In the end, we must grow our community (Devs, Users, Potential Investors, etc)


Are there more other activities that you find more effective than Meetups you think we should look to support?
Yes, Meetups are just a place to meet people. What happen after the meetup is more important than the meetup itself. For my experiences, I make friends with new peers and then we build a group, a website and explore other ideas (Make arts, memes to promote Blockstack for example)


If you’ve done a Meetup, did you find that it accomplished what you wanted? Did you feel it was worth the effort?
Yes, Meetup is worth it. Few month ago, there is only me, now my team have 4 members and we also have 3 contributors (4 of them I met at meetup)


If Meetups are a worthy investment, how should we measure their success? How should Blockstack PBC support you and reward you for hosting them?
Oh, That’s tough question. Because only the organizer knows what his/her goals are. So my answer is if you wanna know, just ask the organizer. Blockstack should have some kind of support budget for organizing a Meetup and you can reward his/her with stacks.

Do you feel it pollutes the system with bad motivations if say, we paid the top Meetup producers? Like we will be doing with app rewards mining, what if the top 20 most active Evangelists by some measures, we’re paid out in stacks every month - or something similar? @nguyen l - the other thing we were thinking was establishing a healthy # of meetups per year per location and then if Evangelists make that happen, they get a paid trip to a summit of some kind, whatever major Blockstack Berlin type event is happening that year or similar. Thoughts?

First, I believe pay Evangelists is good for the system because with that incentives we will bring more users, investors, developers and evangelists.
Second, I think Evangelists love them both - stack and trip. I guess all Evangelists want stack (have freedom to spend it) and some (or most) Evangelists want trip (each person has his/her own reason) and of course Blockstack wanna reward us with good motivations. 
There are many unknown variables, like what’s the number of Evangelists who can go to a summit? (If it’s less than 20, it’s not good because with stack, you have 20 happy people and with trip you have less than 20.) Or what if an Evangelist wanna exchange trip for stack? Is it allowed? (If it’s allowed then it’s not much different than stack) etc
An easy way to know which one Evangelists most prefer is make a poll. 😁