You know, here in Edinburgh I could find dozens of venues where it
might be a pub, but allowed those under 18; or, it was open to all, but
also served alcohol.
What I never-ever-ever want is the same venue as we had today.
I've been in better-presented student squats, that were fighting
eviction; with better-quality coffee, better chairs (not ones that
looked as-if they were stolen out a skip), and with walls where the
plaster was not - for want of a better description - rotting.
Starbucks would've been better than The Brew Lab, so no more Edinburgh
Wikimeets in there please! Took them 20 minutes to make me a coffee,
they'd no change when I went to pay with a £5 note, and they still
insisted on charging the 30p card fee when I paid that way to help them
out. I could readily buy a pint of small-batch, hand-brewed, craft ale
for less than they wanted for a mediocre coffee in a venue where you
wonder if plugging into an electrical socket will make your hair stand
on end.
Had I not been there for a meeting, I would've read them their
character, called them on the place being an utter shit-hole, and left.
I'm glad I did not try to encourage the Glasgow Openstreetmap crowd, or
Edinburgh Linux group, to come along; I would've been near-mortally
embarrassed.
On 22.09.2014 14:01, Charles Matthews wrote:
On 22 September 2014 13:53, rexx wrote:
We have pubs in Oxford, Coventry, Cambridge, Manchester and now
Liverpool that are usually relatively quiet and uncrowded, so
conversation is much easier. Dan Haigh and I have done informal
initial training a couple of times in the pub - its easy enough
one-to-one and you can get a new editor started in 20-30 mins.
On a point of detail, the Cambridge meetup is in a brasserie-type
place, rather than a pub (we head off to a pub later if folk want).
And it starts middle of the afternoon, which is between midday and
early evening peak times.
The pub-or-not debate seems quite significant to me, as the
community-and-how-to-grow-it debate in microcosm. If you understand
why a meetup that starts in a pub will always be in a pub, you have a
clue why entrenched cultural factors in the online community also
seem
quite stubborn.
Charles
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