Hi Ethan,
thanks for the “resuscitation” of this thread. I think that both an online meeting of Discourse operators from Europe and also a personal meeting would be inspiring and helpful. A personal meetup could be organised as a workshop session inside one of the larger and already established open source community meetings we have in Europe (e.g. the CCC Hamburg and also the FOSDEM in Brussels).
Currently there is high awareness for online communication solutions which are NOT part of the dominating US-tech-oligarchy (Facekbook/Instagram, X and so on). Therefore we can see a growing interest even in the less “nerdy/tecchy” communities. Earlier in May I attended the 2MR conference in Hamburg (see Home - English - 2MR - Ein Festival der guten Beispiele ). Another interesting event was the Re.publica hold two weeks ago in Berlin ( Startseite - re:publica | republica ). See the talk about the new Discourse-based communication platform “Wiblio” in the Berlin libraries which was presented by Ralf Stockmann (https://meta.discourse.org/t/wibiblio-discourse-based-community-building-for-libraries-at-re-publica-berlin/403219r)
Re:Publica just created a new branch with the first Re.publica event in Vienna which is scheduled for October this year ( Startseite | re:publica Vienna ).
I would hope for some interest from the official CDKC staff, e.g from @Danielle and @HAWK to discuss this. And we need more people expressing their interest in a personal meeting of “Discoursers” in Europe and an idea about an agenda for such an event. For me, the connection between the Fediverse /ActivityPub and Discourse and how this could link “regional” with “global” context-oriented information and communication, would be a really interesting aspect.