Gauging interest for a meet this year

[Thestatusquo]

Hey y'all,

Was thinking last night about how there really hasn't been a US side meet in a very long time.

Seems like these days all the energy for meets is on the LSG/Survivor side and indeed we have several survivor meets currently in the works and I just hosted one myself last year.

BUT I miss the existence of mafia side meets, where there is no LSG or game unifying the meet and its more just a chance for people to hang out and meet people from the site and see old friends.

I was wondering if there was interest in one of those things happening this year.

Tentative thoughts:

1) Would be looking to rent an airbnb. In the past there's been several strategies for hosting. Previous meets I have hosted in Chicago have been split up among different houses for the hosts. The commune meets used this strategy as well. It can work fine but there's a couple things I don't like. It can feel like you're at a different meet from other people depending on where you end up, and it means that the hosts have to constantly be serving as shuttles bringing people together from the various houses. It also requires you to have more than one willing host in a given area. This used to be the case in Chicago but I doubt it is anymore, and I am incapable of hosting more than a few people at my own place.

The advantages of doing it this way are mainly cost. It doesn't cost anything for hosts to open up their own homes, so they generally don't have to charge anyone anything and people don't generally have to pay for anything other than their own food and travel.

The potential cost of an airbnb from some research would be approximately somewhere from 150-250 per person if we expect 20 people total including the host.

2) I think I would rather do it it somewhere outside chicago rather than in chicago proper. The reason for this is that lodging is much much much cheaper outside of chicago and also much better in terms of the kind of place we can rent (the number of beds, for instance, the amenities, etc) but we do lose out on the charm of being in Chicago and the various tourist things people can do there, which is non-zero. In my experience people generally have had one day they set aside for doing things in the city they're in and we would miss out on that. It also makes the logistics of travel more difficult. If you can just fly into a major city and take transit to the location that is very easy but if the closest real airport is an hour away that means there needs to be work done to pick people up and bring them to the site. Would like to know people's thoughts on this, since I'm not really sure which tradeoff is better here.

3) Timeframe, I don't really have an opinion on timeframe so I'd like to know what times are better people. Ideally we would not compete with any of the other meets i.e. survivor, but if there are people traveling to the US for the Survivor meet it might be cool to have them in close proximity so that people could stick around and attend both? I don't know how much of a real consideration this is vs. just general fatigue and burnout people might have about such things happening very close in proximity to each other?

So, yeah:

TL;DR
Meet sometime this year?
Maybe in Chicago maybe outside of chicago
Somewhere between 150-250 per person for lodgings?

Thoughts? Interests? Generalized ramblings?

[Thestatusquo]

My experience is that it tends to be a fair mix.

[Thestatusquo]

Looks like summer is far and away the most popular option, so I'm going to tentatively lock that in.

[Thestatusquo]

Well, I got laid off so I'm now in a much more tenuous position re: being able to host this than I was at the time of this thread's creation.

[Thestatusquo]

I would definitely be interested in a meet still, I just can't be the one fronting costs.

[Thestatusquo]

In my experience with planning stuff like this you need to just make decisions and then people will complain about them later but generally call to action type stuff gets no response