With local Data Science meetups cancelled, I sought to find where in the world had upcoming online meetups - and find I did!
Some have some spectacular speaker line-ups, including some of the world's best in natural language processing, image classification systems, reinforcement learning in robotics, forecasting and a lot on more niche topics! - much more variety than I would ever have access to locally.
Many of these meetups are intended for a smallish (<300) audiences, so some are fairly unpolished, which, IMHO, adds to the enjoyment of pilfering through them for hidden teasures, and offers the kind of frank discussion not possible in wider forums.
As PG once alluded to, after audiences become sufficiently large, speakers will cease speaking frankly:
"If we ever broadcast them ... speakers would clam up" — Paul Graham, EconTalk with Russ Roberts
So will this renaissance of candid, intellectual discussion persist? Probably not, so find them and check them out while they last!
Install R, and RStudio IDE (google them, they're both free). Installation time: ~ 2 minutes for both.
Clone the repo and open meetups.R with RStudio and set the topic variable (line 5) to something you enjoy - here are some ideas - copy the topic from the url: whatever comes after 'meetup.com/topics/' - the default in the script is r-project-for-statistical-computing
E.g.
Then select all the code in the script and run it with command + enter (or run it line by line if you prefer). In a few minutes, you'll have a curated data.frame of meetups on your topic of choice, their time (in your timezone), descriptions and, importantly, the video conference links!
Clone the repo and read in r_meetups.RDS with
meetups <- readRDS("data/r_meetups.RDS")View and explore the file you read with
View(meetups)Note all the zoom, meet.google, youtube, and facebook live stream links (a couple highlighted below)
Once you've crawled a topic's meetups, use whats_on() to see what's on today or tomorrow
E.g.
# meetups <- readRDS("data/r_meetups.RDS")
whats_on("r-project-for-statistical-computing", meetups)