Nice & practical tips! Thanks.

For almost 30 years we have been running a similar regular group meeting in the general area of statistical genetics/genetic epidemiology at the Univ. of Washington. This grew from ~5 attendees in a monthly meeting to 20-25/week in a regular weekly meeting, and was a critical component of building our community. Any area that is cross-disciplinary, with a strong underlying technical bent, will have similar issues: people are spread out over different departments, have different applications but use similar techniques, and consist of attendees at all different stages of training.

Adapting to the desires & needs of the attending group is foremost, and keeping the whole thing casual and low-work is critical to its longevity. We found that it is also useful some of the time to pick a "theme" for the quarter's meetings. That way we can read up on a series of papers that start with an example of a motivating problem, and proceed through development of the methods from the simplest and earliest attempts at solutions to more current and sophisticated solutions. This way we can creep up on a big, technical, paper, because the ideas have been developed along the way.