There were 51 total responses. The 2013 LessWrong survey got 1636 responses, a lot more. But the number here is non-negligible, considering I said we were just gauging interest in this preliminary post.
Most respondents are in STEM fields (software, math, chemistry, etc., including two in economics). Five are non-STEM (carpentry, psych, etc.).
There is a mix of students (14 respondents), professionals (most respondents), and about two or three executives or company owners.
Below are the types of networking people are interested in. The number of employees/employers are reasonably matched. The near-equality between those seeking investment opportunities and investments is surprising. The “Other” results included “Mentees” and general networking.
I would suggest perhaps contacting each person who contacted you via email or PM to ask whether they would like to opt into a private mailing list? I would definitely opt into such a mailing list. There’s a Less Wrong Parents mailing list, why not a Less Wrong Networking mailing list?
It’s hard to get momentum in any mailing list: It requires a good number of active participants. This is especially true in a group for networking, where connections scale as O(n^2). Even if the list were active, it would require all participants to monitor it for the rare occasions when they see a message that is relevant to them.
Here’s an idea: People could post on their LW profiles that they are willing to be contacted using the LW messaging system. They will state their readiness to be a mentor, or their willingness to get job offers, etc.
If these could be aggregated in a single page, e.g., on the wiki—preferably automatically—it would make things even easier.
This requires effort on each potential participant with questionable results esp. without an aggregation mechanism.
The key point seems to be the get as many people as possible into one small spot to reach a critical mass of potential connections. Then everybody could be confident to get any opportunities if there are any at all.
Thus I propose one central virtual networking meetup e.g. a large groupchat at a scheduled time in a chatroom with a fixed number of associated tinychats (e.g. one for each topics). Then announce the time and chatroom as loud as possible on LW and with enough time to book this in the calendar.
My original reasoning behind suggesting a mailing list was that it would remove the bottleneck of time-pressure which would be associated with a single massive group chat event. For example, the prior probability that I could make it to an arbitrarily scheduled group chat is around 2%, but I could respond to email at my leisure. The email could simply be step 1 of a process that would evolve into something else. Right now, JoshuaFox has basically the most useful piece of information to come out of this, which is a list of email addresses of Less Wrong users with interest in business networking … I am merely trying to find a way for that list to be made available in a way that all the participants find agreeable.
There were 51 total responses. The 2013 LessWrong survey got 1636 responses, a lot more. But the number here is non-negligible, considering I said we were just gauging interest in this preliminary post.
Most respondents are in STEM fields (software, math, chemistry, etc., including two in economics). Five are non-STEM (carpentry, psych, etc.).
There is a mix of students (14 respondents), professionals (most respondents), and about two or three executives or company owners.
Below are the types of networking people are interested in. The number of employees/employers are reasonably matched. The near-equality between those seeking investment opportunities and investments is surprising. The “Other” results included “Mentees” and general networking.
I don’t know where we’ll take this from here, but let me know if you have any thoughts on this.
I would suggest perhaps contacting each person who contacted you via email or PM to ask whether they would like to opt into a private mailing list? I would definitely opt into such a mailing list. There’s a Less Wrong Parents mailing list, why not a Less Wrong Networking mailing list?
There is a LW parents mailing list? How do I get in?
EDIT: I guess I found it: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/less-wrong-parents
It’s hard to get momentum in any mailing list: It requires a good number of active participants. This is especially true in a group for networking, where connections scale as O(n^2). Even if the list were active, it would require all participants to monitor it for the rare occasions when they see a message that is relevant to them.
Here’s an idea: People could post on their LW profiles that they are willing to be contacted using the LW messaging system. They will state their readiness to be a mentor, or their willingness to get job offers, etc.
If these could be aggregated in a single page, e.g., on the wiki—preferably automatically—it would make things even easier.
This requires effort on each potential participant with questionable results esp. without an aggregation mechanism.
The key point seems to be the get as many people as possible into one small spot to reach a critical mass of potential connections. Then everybody could be confident to get any opportunities if there are any at all.
Thus I propose one central virtual networking meetup e.g. a large groupchat at a scheduled time in a chatroom with a fixed number of associated tinychats (e.g. one for each topics). Then announce the time and chatroom as loud as possible on LW and with enough time to book this in the calendar.
My original reasoning behind suggesting a mailing list was that it would remove the bottleneck of time-pressure which would be associated with a single massive group chat event. For example, the prior probability that I could make it to an arbitrarily scheduled group chat is around 2%, but I could respond to email at my leisure. The email could simply be step 1 of a process that would evolve into something else. Right now, JoshuaFox has basically the most useful piece of information to come out of this, which is a list of email addresses of Less Wrong users with interest in business networking … I am merely trying to find a way for that list to be made available in a way that all the participants find agreeable.
Two outcomes are the idea of updating your user page and a new Google Group.
Also, the idea of connecting on LinkedIn to other LW’ers.