Its great to see the number of meetups flourishing. As an "old geezer" I felt perfectly at home at the meetup organised in London last week, which was well attended and buzzing with interesting conversations. The link between the online community turning into a real community (which can reinforce giving behaviour etc) is really powerful in building strength and depth in effective altruism. If organisers of the events could drop quick meetup reports here we could build the knowledge base of what is working and what isn't, what meetups could do etc it would probably also inspire people to start more.

Certainly i am inspired to start a slightly older group in London, with a link to and expertise from the core movement, which would provide two way learning - how to engage with the older mainstream, non-academic community, and start to normalise "making the most difference possible" as a normal, worthwhile thing to do in the mainstream community, and be inspired by an amazing community of young people who are doing exactly that. Thoughts/comments would be appreciated.

Just a thought - a huge number of people get involved in small charities for "self actualisation"/ego-enhancement and do so incredibly ineffectively, with the whole thing turning into an opportunity for self promotion which achieves very little at all - effective or not. Effective Altruists have a real opportunity to offer consulting services and provide guiding lights to doing more and doing it better on that particular cause, and in so doing gently introduce new (highly effective) causes to a broad cross section of the population. For example offering to provide xx hours of consultancy for $xx per hour (to be directly donated to your chosen cause) would:

• assist your chosen cause;
• help the assisted charity do what it does more effectively;
• open the minds of the people involved in the particular charity to the concepts of "effective altruism" generally and your chosen cause in particular.

Thoughts/comments would be appreciated.