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Rebooting the Thursday night meetups

Thursday, February 18, 2010 by Dave Winer.

It's a long story.. When I was a research fellow at Berkman Center starting in 2003, I held a series of Thursday night meetups, open to everyone, with a single purpose -- to boot up a blogging community in Cambridge. It worked. And the meetings worked, and they continue to this day.  

Now I'm working at NYU, as part of Jay's Studio 20 program, to help get some new journalism booted up. I wrote about this in my Year Zero piece. As part of the process we're rebooting the equivalent of the Berkman Thursday meetups, but instead of being in Cambridge, they're of course in NY, at 20 Cooper Square. And since tonight is Thursday, we're having (the first) one tonight.  

We did the networking very low-key to begin. I want to give it a chance to grow slowly and carefully, to find our way to a new mission. I have my own ideas, but we're welcoming many others. The idea is to pull together a group of New York media hackers, and people visiting from all over the world, esp from NYU, and see where it takes us. 

My goals are to learn how to teach sources, people with ideas and information and know-how, to be reporters. And I want to try the ideas of Hypercamp, and maybe Checkbox News and Future-safe Archives, to name a few. That's why universities are so damned cool, they let you explore ideas.  

A few notes for people attending the inaugural meetup. 

We're using BloggerCon rules. That means there's a discussion leader. It's not a free-for-all, it's highly structured. But the ideas and information come from the room, not from speakers who drone on and on with self-serving boring "messages" and "business models." In this room "we" come first, not him or her or you or me. 

Everyone is expected to read the rules. 

http://bloggercon.org/II/newbies.html  

Everyone is expected to participate. There is no audience, no speaker, no panel. 

We once had a BloggerCon where almost no one read the rules. It didn't work very well. 

One more thing. We've been talking about what to call this, and no doubt tonight we will continue to do so. I am proposing to adopt the Fight Club theme. When we started the Berkman Thursday meetups I had not seen Fight Club so I couldn't have known to recommend it. Now I have. Almost everyone I mention this to lights up. The Fight Club and blogging are pretty much the same thing imho.  

To people looking for the meetup, we're in Room 654 at 20 Cooper Sq, NYC.