The first meetup on March 14th, 2018, titled Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies 101, was very flexible and a 100% success.
Originally, the objective was to go over basic concepts for the first meetup and network a little bit. However, after a few mentions of Steem and Bitshares, the entire two hour slot became dedicated to the fundamentals of DPOS, security tradeoffs and benefits, and the scalability of DPOS versus alternatives.
For the first twenty minutes, we went over the basics of blockchain by showing a demo video of mining and hashes. If you haven't seen a visual illustration of what a blockchain, see the following link
https://anders.com/blockchain/
It became clear that many were beyond the basic level and most were working on a crypto project. Other topics that were discussed included: valuation of cyrptocurrencies, initial coin offering and the SEC, and smart contracts. I will definitely host another Meetup next month and focus it entirely to Bitshares and Steem because that is where all the excitement is right now.