I've been thinking of starting a Rust meetup in Berkeley, CA. I know there are big ones right across the bay in SF, but they are somewhat few and far between, and can be dauntingly large! I'm a student at UC Berkeley, and was thinking of holding a series of meetups, starting with one along the lines of introducing rust, getting rustup installed on everyone's machines, and then hacking away at some intro problems. I'd love to expose other students to rust, and have a nice atmosphere locally to get together and talk about rust. If anyone is interested, please let me know!
I'm one of the organisers of the Rust Hack & Learn in Berlin and I can very much recommend doing such a thing. It's not much of an effort (you just have to find a room where you can go every other week) and very productive. People love learning together.
If you want to run the first edition, please send a mail to community-team@rust-lang.org, so that we can help you promote it!