@anthonyjwells and @CllrKeithKelly

We met!

Special mention for  @TOWIWoolwich who ventured ‘the wrong way’ along the railway, outside Zone 6 to act as ambassador from the London Boroughs.

There were six of us in total. The bonus of being able to follow the England v Poland game on TV was offset by the Royal Oak being busier and noisier [and hotter!] than it would usually be on a weekday evening.

No great social or political movement was born on the spot. I think we were mainly interested in just finding more out about each other – though we did have a bit of a foray into town planning.

The striking thing for me was that everyone I hadn’t met before turned out to be different from the impression I had built up through twitter alone.  As a result my future exchanges with them will be changed in some way.

Everyone felt it had been fun and worthwhile, and are up for meeting again. Indeed, although this was a small beginning, I had messages via tweets and DMs that amounted to another 12 people who actively want to attend next time. Beyond that I need to check out 8 people for their future interest, and there are another 8 accounts for people who don’t particularly want to meet up, but do want to see news and information.

One obstacle for people was definitely needing really good notice of the date. So I’m proposing Monday 18th November [7:30 Royal Oak again] for the next #dartfordtweetup – and I’m also proposing “third Monday in the month” as a regular pattern until we discover some reason to change it.

I’ll keep using twitter to remind people – and another blog post in a short while to keep a rolling list of who’s coming to the next one. But there are also three things you can do to feed back, or keep up communication:

1. Leave a comment via the link at the bottom of this post

2. Tweet using the #dartfordtweetup hashtag. Some people will pick up on it. You could also keep a search open for it yourself

3. Check out my public twitter list  of possible #dartfordtweetup people. You can subscribe to this list – or you can just go and look at it to see what a range of people in the Dartford area are saying, Twitter doesn’t let you post ‘at’ a list – but actually that wouldn’t make a lot of sense anyway. You can also suggest people for me to add to the list, or get me to take you off it, if not appropriate.

Thanks to @Thayer, @anthonyjwells, @CllrKeithKelly, @TOWIWoolwich, and @alastairwood for making the first #dartfordtweetup happen. Thanks to the many people who took the trouble to reply and say they might make it, or would like to come in future.

Looking forward to the next one!