I am an Analytics Meetup Junkie

I am not sure if there is a 12 step program to address this issue, but I think I might form a meetup of meetup addicts (MeetAnon).  Now I am a member of thirty Meetup groups and attend at least two meetups a week. I even have a collection of Meetup T-shirts.

It all started innocently enough. Years ago, my previous company funded some food for a New York R users group. I did not go to it at the time, but a year out of that company I was interested in what those people at the forefront of R development were working on. So I went to my first meetup. There was pizza and specialty ices, and a great talk by Andrew Gelman. After the meetup, the  group went out for drinks and discussions about statistics. I was hooked, but I also needed more than one meeting a month.

I joined the predictive analytics meetup in NYC. I joined the Machine Learning group in NYC. I found that these groups shared a lot of commonality, but also looked at problems from slightly different angles. I started to think about visualizations of problems so I joined the Data Visualization Meetup in NYC. After I added the various Hadoop Meetups in NYC, I exhausted the ones in New York that interested me. I needed to expand my reach.

I joined the RUG in New Jersey, Boston, Washington DC, Chicago. I have also added sport groups to my stable of Meetups. Right now it is mostly Baseball and Sabermetrics, but I am sure that will develop as well.

Here are the links to my Favorite meetups:
Boston Predictive Analytics Meetup
Greater Boston R User Meetup
NYC R user Meetup
NYC Predictive Analytics Meetup
NYC Machine Learning Meetup
NYC Data Visualization Meetup