Hacker News Reader

Comment by EnderMB | Hacker News Reader

Out of interest, how many people from outside London go to these meetups?

I'm in Bristol, so a bit far to travel.

I went to london specifically for the last- i live in northern ireland

We've had someone travel from France in the past! You should have told us in advance and we could have reserved a prime seat right up at the front for you.

... and probably saved you some pizza

being picked on by sanderson is not what i would have wanted...

There are typically quite a few people from Brighton and Cambridge who come along. We usually finish at around 10pm so there is scope for getting the train home after.

The furthest that people have traveled just for the event (that I am aware of) is from Paris.

Not sure numbers but there's definitely people who travel a couple of hours from outside London to get to it.

Alternatively why not setup a local HN meetup for Bristol and the south west ?

I'm unconvinced that Bristol (or any other region of the UK, especially those commutable to London) has the critical mass necessary to support one. Perhaps a worthwhile experiment though.

To be fair, HN London started off with 15-20 people in the living room of one guys apartment and now we've got over 4,000 members.

IIRC it was 15-20 in Songkick's original offices at the back of Spitalfields market (although physical size wise it was probably about the size of a living room), it frequently over-flowed into the corridor.

They used to make everyone introduce themselves at the start, modern HN meetups lack that sense of intimacy :)

I'd say critical mass is around 20 passionate people who do cool stuff. Once you have that the rest is surprisingly easy.

Well, there are two MS/.NET usergroups in Bristol, one of which has had 100+ people in attendance a couple of times and there a few other user groups in human factors and such.

London will always be the exception, but given the number of user groups already held in Bristol that manage to get around 50-100+ people in a month with ease I think that Bristol would be the natural choice outside of London.

Whether a HN meetup would be successful or not is another story. It'd be entirely down to who would choose to organise it and what they could offer to local HN members.

Yeh, South West Founders seems to be consistently pretty popular. Don't get me wrong, it's definitely something that I'd love to happen.

I'm in Cardiff, and I'd attend a Bristol meetup.

I would go to that one (I am also in Bristol). London is way too far away when you factor in driving back and forth to the train plus tube in London.

I used to travel up from Brighton (1 hour on the train, about 1.5 hours each way all in), now I live in London (and work a 5 min walk from the event).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com