Here in the Washington DC area, the technology community has become (or has been for a while) a vary vibrant community where a tech meetup can found on almost any night of the week.
From the Northern Virginia Java and Ruby users groups which tend to have very in-depth talks to groups such as RefreshDC which have a audience of designers, developers, and social media experts - one of the challenges of picking which events to go to is determining how in-depth the talk will be.