I think it’s worth thinking about how much to turn the thing into a machine that keeps the events and meetings churning as they have been on easy mode, and how much to have new heroes that turn the organization into a new labor of love that is in a slightly different direction. In one direction, you’re building systems, and in another direction you’re building autonomy and instigatingyness.
I think there can be a problem where when people are working in a system and it is easy and pretty good, they aren’t quite paying attention to the things they would really want if they were running things—and often those ideas are better than the system. The simplest way that this occurs is when people do the minimum the system asks, vs when they are working with the system and using it to help them make things awesome.
People can be influenced to move towards the self organizing direction by asking them what they think would be awesome, and getting details of what’s cool about that and why they want, and providing social capital / organizational capital etc to help implement their thing. It’s usually well received if you are trying to help them get more of the thing that they want. There might be some other things that are important in this process, I’m not sure what those are.
In this vein, I would be very interested in hearing anecdotes about how easy mode events feel different from hard mode events. I don’t think I’ve ever participated in an easy mode event that did not feel like a poor use of time, but that might be due to the environments where those happened (schools and universities).
Specifically in a rationality-community-paradigm, I think a good framework is something like “have a roster of fairly easy-mode events you can run for low effort, but as often as possible try to have an effort that requires something to put something interesting together.”
I think having a basic framework of “people take turns making sure at least something happens each week”, and anyone who puts effort into a cool/different thing happening will tend to get bonus status, and people can try out new bigger or wildly-different things on non-meetup-days if they want.
I think it’s worth thinking about how much to turn the thing into a machine that keeps the events and meetings churning as they have been on easy mode, and how much to have new heroes that turn the organization into a new labor of love that is in a slightly different direction. In one direction, you’re building systems, and in another direction you’re building autonomy and instigatingyness.
I think there can be a problem where when people are working in a system and it is easy and pretty good, they aren’t quite paying attention to the things they would really want if they were running things—and often those ideas are better than the system. The simplest way that this occurs is when people do the minimum the system asks, vs when they are working with the system and using it to help them make things awesome.
People can be influenced to move towards the self organizing direction by asking them what they think would be awesome, and getting details of what’s cool about that and why they want, and providing social capital / organizational capital etc to help implement their thing. It’s usually well received if you are trying to help them get more of the thing that they want. There might be some other things that are important in this process, I’m not sure what those are.
In this vein, I would be very interested in hearing anecdotes about how easy mode events feel different from hard mode events. I don’t think I’ve ever participated in an easy mode event that did not feel like a poor use of time, but that might be due to the environments where those happened (schools and universities).
So the way I’m _hoping_ to think of this is in having a machine that outputs agency. In particular, that’s what I think most of the point of having meetups is.
Specifically in a rationality-community-paradigm, I think a good framework is something like “have a roster of fairly easy-mode events you can run for low effort, but as often as possible try to have an effort that requires something to put something interesting together.”
I think having a basic framework of “people take turns making sure at least something happens each week”, and anyone who puts effort into a cool/different thing happening will tend to get bonus status, and people can try out new bigger or wildly-different things on non-meetup-days if they want.