Description of subprojects and results, including major changes from the original proposal

Closing this project out because gone far beyond our 4 pilot meetups!

We did 4 pilot meetups from Sept 2024 -Jan 2025 and then one meetup each month for all of 2025.

We ultimately ended up building out 24 individual forecasting and prediction market meetups across 6 different cities: DC, NYC, Philadelphia, Berlin, Boston, and Dallas.

We raised $7,200 in additional funding from a combination of Manifold, Kalshi, and Polymarket.

The Washingtonian wrote a profile on our DC chapter organizer, Pratik Chougule, after attending a few meetups. It mentioned both Manifold and Kalshi.

Through connections made at our DC chapter meetups, the DC community organized the first ever ManifestX, a community-organized version of Manifest a la TedX that hosted over 60 individuals for a day-long unconference in downtown DC. Read about it here and here.

Some meetups we had as few as 6 attendees while our most attended DC meetup drew 26 with our NYC meetup ahead of EAG NY drew even more.

We built a mailing list of over 100 subscribers.

Overall, we've validated the value of these events and expect to continue them in the future, despite perhaps our mission of popularizing prediction markets already being well on its way to completion due to the success of Polymarket, Kalshi, and Manifold in their own rights.

A huge thanks to everyone who supported us early on that gave us the courage to get this going! Sign up to receive notifications when we come to your city here. Hope to see you at a meetup soon!

Spending breakdown

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-SoY03bQBqtWG7kBgVqdrheY2RuEmdCgFDXRv7x-N8w/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Thank you @nikki for your additional support!

What progress have you made since your last update?

See previous comment

What are your next steps?

See previous comment

Is there anything others could help you with?

See previous comment

We continue to host these meetups monthly! 10-20 attendees come per month and we’ve had speakers from Manifold, PredictIt, as well as journalists and thought leaders like Robin Hanson.

While technically our pilot period has concluded, we are still open to funding for future meetups.

What progress have you made since your last update?

We hosted our December meetup this past Wednesday! We had 15 attendees, down from October's meetup where we had 26 attendees. The decline in attendance was likely due to rainy and cold weather in addition to the fact that this was not a sponsored event so the space was semi-private instead of private and food and drink was not provided but available for purchase.

In the past month we are are excited to have received $2000 in funding from Polymarket to sponsor 4 meetups in 2025.

What are your next steps?

Schedule and plan a January meetup. The event page is here: https://partiful.com/e/tgYHaoevQ78X7hpnDUHA

Following this event we'll close this project as we'll have completed the 4 pilot meetups we wanted, and we've gained funding off the platform from sponsorships. That said, we still have 3-4 months worth of meetups in 2025 that are not yet sponsored, so continued financial support is welcomed.

Is there anything others could help you with?

Continued funding/sponsorship to help us secure private venues in the future for meetups and/or sponsor food for attendees.

What progress have you made since your last update?

We hosted our October meetup last Tuesday! We had 26 attendees, up from September's meetup where we had 16 attendees. We provided free pizza, salad, dessert, beer, wine, and soft drinks to attendees. We had a guest speaker, Professor Anthony Pickles.

We also received $2500 in funding from Manifold to sponsor October's meetup as well as quarterly meetups in 2025.

What are your next steps?

Schedule and plan a November/December meetup. The event page is here: https://partiful.com/e/25l8CCEwAuCwKCWEfC9V

We received some interest from a Polymarket employee about sponsoring future events, so we'll be following up with them about sponsorship.

Is there anything others could help you with?

Continued funding/sponsorship to help us secure private venues in the future for meetups and/or sponsor food for attendees.

We also have 26 subscribers to our newsletter: https://bit.ly/forecastingmeetupnetwork

What progress have you made since your last update?

We hosted our September meetup! We had 18 people from the EA community, rationality community, Manifund users, a Polymarket employee, and individuals in the political gambling space.

We collected feedback via a survey afterward asking attendees to forecast their likelihood of coming to a future meetup - of the 3 individuals who responded, one said 85% and two others said 70%.

Pratik recorded and published a podcast episode where he interviewed me about how to organize a forecasting meetup (Apple Podcasts, Spotify).

Pratik and I finalized the details for our October meetup, which will take place tomorrow, Tuesday, October 29th at 6pm. We'll be spending the bulk of our funding from Manifund to cater the event with a pizza, salad, and dessert buffet, as well as beer, wine, and soft drinks. We also have a guest speaker lined up to discuss political forecasting. More details and RSVP here: https://partiful.com/e/ITHDAcznT1DppUXD2p9x

We met with Stephen Grugett about potential sponsorship from Manifold for future events. We have written a proposal we'll be sharing with him to see if we can come to an agreed sponsorship deal.

Finally, we got interest from an individual in Boston who may be interested in starting a forecasting meetup chapter there. He hosted a forecasting meetup on Thu, Oct 24th under the ACX banneer that seemed to go well.

What are your next steps?

Host the October meetup tomorrow and schedule and plan a November/December meetup.

Align with Stephen on a sponsorship agreement with Manifold for mid-term funding of the DC meetup group.

Is there anything others could help you with?

Continued funding/sponsorship to help us secure private venues in the future for meetups and/or sponsor food for attendees.

What progress have you made since your last update?

Pratik recorded and published a podcast episode (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, starts at ~35:35) that previews and invites the Star Spangled Gamblers audience to the inaugural meetup on Thursday. It has a special shoutout to the original funders of this project - take a listen!

Pratik published another podcast episode (Apple Podcasts, Spotify) where he and I discuss the origin story of this meetup network idea and our vision for the future of the meetup network. A 2nd episode containing the rest of the interview will be published soon.

We created a Discord (bit.ly/forecastingdiscord) for meetup members to connect between monthly meetups, sharing forecasting resources, links, etc.

Pratik and I started planning the October meetup - we really want to go all-out on this one since it's right before the election.

What are your next steps?

Host the inaugural September meetup tomorrow and schedule and plan an October meetup.

Publish part 2 of the SSG podcast interview.

Is there anything others could help you with?

For our first meetup, we chose a venue that will give us a semi-private space for free, but being a bar it may not be the most conducive to facilitating conversation. We also will not be sponsoring food for this inaugural event. Additional funding will help us secure more private spaces in the future and/or sponsor food for attendees.

Also, tracking meetup history, organizers, and expenses transparently here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-SoY03bQBqtWG7kBgVqdrheY2RuEmdCgFDXRv7x-N8w/edit

Thanks for the support EA community! We welcome continued funding.

What progress have you made since your last update?

We raised $657 through the EA Community Choice funding round.

We booked a venue and scheduled our first meetup - we already have over 21 RSVPs with over a week to go!: https://partiful.com/e/zpObY6EmiQEkgpcJB6Aw

RSVPs have come from marketing efforts through the Forecasting Newsletter substack, EA DC newsletter, and various EA and forecasting Slack groups and Discord servers. The event page asks attendees where they heard about us when they RSVP, so we'll have some data to know our most effective marketing channels.

We set up a website/mailing list to keep the momentum and attendance for future meetups: https://bit.ly/forecastingmeetupnetwork

We recorded a podcast episode of Star Spangled Gamblers talking about this project that will be published in the next week or so.

David attended 1 rationality meetup and plans to attend another where he's recruiting attendees for the September forecasting forecasting meetup.

What are your next steps?

Continue marketing the event through additional channels.

Host the inaugural September meetup on the 26th and schedule an October meetup.

Publish SSG podcast episode.

Is there anything others could help you with?

For our first meetup, we chose a venue that will give us a semi-private space for free, but being a bar it may not be the most conducive to facilitating conversation. We also will not be sponsoring food for this inaugural event. Additional funding will help us secure more private spaces in the future and/or sponsor food for attendees.

@lucas already ahead of me! 💪

@lucas just stumbled upon something that might be relevant: https://www.safe.ai/blog/forecasting (see "News stories." section)

Thank you again @Austin ! Thanks for getting us to our minimum!

Thanks @Austin !

@TonyGao Thanks for your support!

Like this project but run out of funds? An upvote is appreciated!

@nikki Thanks for your support!

@Marine-Lercier thank you for your support!

The world needs to better understand the importance of calibration - let's help it go mainstream!

Love the creativity and lots of swings at bat for tools that I'm likely to find useful.

Contingency planning in case Manifold goes under one day.

Contingency planning in case Manifold goes under one day!

Donating to this because I had a similar idea myself, https://thepredictionpost.substack.com/, that I've since discontinued. Love the data and infrastructure angle of this project though. Best of luck! 💪

@TonyGao Fair point. I'm very willing to reevaluate the strategy after this first pilot in DC (of which any funds within the funding goal from this EA Community Choice round would exclusively go).

That said, I'd argue that the same question could be asked of EA meetups - there are specific places where EA might make an outsized impact but I'd argue that doesn't negate the benefit of having EA meetups in many different communities, as a way of potentially creating a surround-sound effect for the movement that exponentially increases awareness and the perception of traction.

I also think there will be diminishing returns for funding in a single city, and a low cost but meaningful reward for spinning up meetups in other cities, as much of the operational challenge simply has to do with finding organizers who live in those cities and funding the minimum necessary to give any individual meetup a baseline level of attraction to draw sufficient attendees.

Love this. Tried something similar at thepredictionpost.substack.com and got good feedback, just didn’t have the time to continue it.