[stcorbett]

The Chicago meetups have been really good. The more recent ones are getting slightly less turnout but are still a great way to spend an evening.

In terms of features/tools to help organize, there's a lot of multi-person messaging back and forth that goes into getting a meetup scheduled, something that helped the group settle on questions like time/date and venue would be useful. I'd be careful about going too far into automating the process, you risk loosing some of the engagement that gets people aware of the meetup. I could see extending the Hacker News' site's up-voting system to various choices for time/date/venue working well for this.

[danielzarick]

I wholly support this idea. Definitely allow upvoting and/or polling, which could be used for date/topic/location/etc.

As a side note, I am starting to think we need a set date/time for Chicago meetups (ie, last Wednesday of every month at 7pm).