Saturday is Meetup Time in Parts of Germany
Nordrhein-Westfalen BookCrossers organize meetings to fit geography
by HerrundmeyerFebruary 12, 2004
Saturday afternoon. 3 p.m. It's Meetup time in Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany.
What? asks the average BookCrosser. Meetups on Saturdays? In the afternoon? Well, yes. This is not a monthly Meetup which is organized through meetup.com. It has been organized in the German forum, the German Yahoo! Group and by some industrious
BookCrossers who found the active members of the region and invited them to the meeting, sending PMs to each and every one of them.
That shouldn't be too difficult, responds the average BookCrosser. Well, yes, it is. "The region" we're talking about is Nordrhein-Westfalen, or North-Rhine-Westphalia, one of the federal states of Germany. It covers an area of roughly 34,000 square kilometres and is the home of about 17 million people in about 50 major cities. The main arteries are the rivers Rhine, with Cologne and Düsseldorf as major cities, and Ruhr, with the large industrial conglomerate consisting of several adjacent cities. That is an awful lot of work, searching for people in those cities, not counting the villages and smaller townships, which of course will have made their way into the members' profiles. And searching by province isn't that easy either – there are several people who use the abbreviation NRW for Nordrhein-Westfalen, or use the English term, or don't use the hyphen, or misspell it, and then some.
But why don't the active members vote at meetup.com? goes the average BookCrosser. Well, the problem again is the size of the region. Even driving at 100 mph on the Autobahn (sorry for making you envious), the distances between possible venues would be rather big, and there would be the problem of choosing one single city to host the meeting. Should that be Cologne, Düsseldorf, Duisburg, Oberhausen, Essen, Bochum, Dortmund, …? You get the idea. And nobody is keen on driving home after a meeting on a Tuesday night for a long distance (nor on using public transport). So, on a Saturday in January 2003, there was a first "Rhein-Ruhr-Treffen" (RRT), or Rhine-Ruhr meeting, and ever since the RRT has toggled between a city in the Ruhr area and a venue a bit upstream the river Rhine, loosely once every two months.
Isn't that all a bit inconvenient? asks the average BookCrosser. Well, yes, it is. But nonetheless, in January 2004, there were 24 people at the RRT in Essen, several of them first-attenders who reacted on the kind PMs by BookCrossers Sidana & Co. And once again, attending the meeting, there was a journalist. And she could see for herself the commitment of the organizers, the commitment of those who came from far away, the books that came from even farther away.
Make the whole world a library – but let there also be physical meetings where members can meet and chat. And if the Meetup venues or times aren't working for you, reorganize them yourself!
That shouldn't be too difficult, responds the average BookCrosser. Well, yes, it is. "The region" we're talking about is Nordrhein-Westfalen, or North-Rhine-Westphalia, one of the federal states of Germany. It covers an area of roughly 34,000 square kilometres and is the home of about 17 million people in about 50 major cities. The main arteries are the rivers Rhine, with Cologne and Düsseldorf as major cities, and Ruhr, with the large industrial conglomerate consisting of several adjacent cities. That is an awful lot of work, searching for people in those cities, not counting the villages and smaller townships, which of course will have made their way into the members' profiles. And searching by province isn't that easy either – there are several people who use the abbreviation NRW for Nordrhein-Westfalen, or use the English term, or don't use the hyphen, or misspell it, and then some.
But why don't the active members vote at meetup.com? goes the average BookCrosser. Well, the problem again is the size of the region. Even driving at 100 mph on the Autobahn (sorry for making you envious), the distances between possible venues would be rather big, and there would be the problem of choosing one single city to host the meeting. Should that be Cologne, Düsseldorf, Duisburg, Oberhausen, Essen, Bochum, Dortmund, …? You get the idea. And nobody is keen on driving home after a meeting on a Tuesday night for a long distance (nor on using public transport). So, on a Saturday in January 2003, there was a first "Rhein-Ruhr-Treffen" (RRT), or Rhine-Ruhr meeting, and ever since the RRT has toggled between a city in the Ruhr area and a venue a bit upstream the river Rhine, loosely once every two months.
Isn't that all a bit inconvenient? asks the average BookCrosser. Well, yes, it is. But nonetheless, in January 2004, there were 24 people at the RRT in Essen, several of them first-attenders who reacted on the kind PMs by BookCrossers Sidana & Co. And once again, attending the meeting, there was a journalist. And she could see for herself the commitment of the organizers, the commitment of those who came from far away, the books that came from even farther away.
Make the whole world a library – but let there also be physical meetings where members can meet and chat. And if the Meetup venues or times aren't working for you, reorganize them yourself!
