Staring at your points, I keep thinking about Mosaic House. Mosaic House was a group house in Boston that ran weekly dinner parties for a year. After six months, they usually had a couple dozen people show up for a random Friday night. Sometimes they had an activity or a topic but the magic ingredients seemed to be that it was the same time, same place. The couple of times they canceled, they still had people show up who hadn’t read the cancellation. Mosaic was great, and only stopped when the group house couldn’t renew their lease.
I’m going to loosely go point by point- not objecting but musing- but I’d be interested in dialoguing about this with you if you’d be up for that.
I don’t think you need the same people to go every week. If I imagine a group of fifty people, each of whom goes to half the meetups every month, that’s more than enough to have a feeling of familiar faces and it’s more than enough consistency for community to exist.
I’m actually pretty excited about mediocre organizers here. I think same time same place and then a solid C+ on the basics (announce the events, have snacks around, have seats and space to mingle, don’t be too hard to travel to) can get a regular crowd. That plus a five minute reading from a script means the group has actual common knowledge. You don’t need ambitious visionaries doing new things as long as you can draw from something exciting. To use churches as an example, you don’t need a pastor capable of writing a holy book and a dozen hymns, because it’s easy to print more copies of the bible and the hymnal.
Group closeness is a little anti-inductive. Aspiring to being best friends seems hard, but aspiring to be warm acquaintances seems doable by just putting people in the same room every week or two and eating together?
I don’t know enough about Sunday Assembly to add anything here.
I don’t know enough about NYC Ethical Society to add anything here.
See 4
You’d know more about Berkeley’s internal dynamics than I would.
I see people start actual churches and they’re still going generations later. I agree with the statistics on overall church attendance declining; I didn’t find a new church when I moved to Boston. I’m interested in how much of this could be mitigated by pointing people at the community wherever they moved away; like, when rationalists move from Boston to NYC or NYC to SF or Boston to Berlin, sometimes they find the local ACX chapter and show up for some meetups.
Some things people don’t want that often, but you don’t need everyone every week, you want people to come often enough they group is full of familiar faces and people can assume some common knowledge. Putting on a whole solstice every week seems hard and like it overfills that particular nutrient, but services can be more like half an hour. “Reading we always do, song we always do, reading that’s new this week, song that’s new this week, The Road To Wisdom, you’re done and the open social is in the room that way” seems fine. Alternately, if it’s a variety issue rotating through four different meetup types every month seems doable.
The thing that’s alive to me is shaped more like a dojo than a church, but I think the bones of both of them (same time, same place, same people) are pretty similar.
Importantly, I think lots of different things can hang on those bones in a way that’s mutually beneficial. To use the church as an example, once you know people are going to be there at that time in that place, you get people saying “it’d be nice to have a book club, but when? Oh, how about the hour before the sermon in the side room?” “Thanks for loaning me that pie tin- I had some spare apples so I baked you an apple pie, why don’t we do a pot luck after the sermon?” “It’d be fun to play soccer. Oh, hey, I’ve got a soccer ball in my car- how about we play on the green by the church after the pot luck?”
Staring at your points, I keep thinking about Mosaic House. Mosaic House was a group house in Boston that ran weekly dinner parties for a year. After six months, they usually had a couple dozen people show up for a random Friday night. Sometimes they had an activity or a topic but the magic ingredients seemed to be that it was the same time, same place. The couple of times they canceled, they still had people show up who hadn’t read the cancellation. Mosaic was great, and only stopped when the group house couldn’t renew their lease.
I’m going to loosely go point by point- not objecting but musing- but I’d be interested in dialoguing about this with you if you’d be up for that.
I don’t think you need the same people to go every week. If I imagine a group of fifty people, each of whom goes to half the meetups every month, that’s more than enough to have a feeling of familiar faces and it’s more than enough consistency for community to exist.
I’m actually pretty excited about mediocre organizers here. I think same time same place and then a solid C+ on the basics (announce the events, have snacks around, have seats and space to mingle, don’t be too hard to travel to) can get a regular crowd. That plus a five minute reading from a script means the group has actual common knowledge. You don’t need ambitious visionaries doing new things as long as you can draw from something exciting. To use churches as an example, you don’t need a pastor capable of writing a holy book and a dozen hymns, because it’s easy to print more copies of the bible and the hymnal.
Group closeness is a little anti-inductive. Aspiring to being best friends seems hard, but aspiring to be warm acquaintances seems doable by just putting people in the same room every week or two and eating together?
I don’t know enough about Sunday Assembly to add anything here.
I don’t know enough about NYC Ethical Society to add anything here.
See 4
You’d know more about Berkeley’s internal dynamics than I would.
I see people start actual churches and they’re still going generations later. I agree with the statistics on overall church attendance declining; I didn’t find a new church when I moved to Boston. I’m interested in how much of this could be mitigated by pointing people at the community wherever they moved away; like, when rationalists move from Boston to NYC or NYC to SF or Boston to Berlin, sometimes they find the local ACX chapter and show up for some meetups.
Some things people don’t want that often, but you don’t need everyone every week, you want people to come often enough they group is full of familiar faces and people can assume some common knowledge. Putting on a whole solstice every week seems hard and like it overfills that particular nutrient, but services can be more like half an hour. “Reading we always do, song we always do, reading that’s new this week, song that’s new this week, The Road To Wisdom, you’re done and the open social is in the room that way” seems fine. Alternately, if it’s a variety issue rotating through four different meetup types every month seems doable.
The thing that’s alive to me is shaped more like a dojo than a church, but I think the bones of both of them (same time, same place, same people) are pretty similar.
Importantly, I think lots of different things can hang on those bones in a way that’s mutually beneficial. To use the church as an example, once you know people are going to be there at that time in that place, you get people saying “it’d be nice to have a book club, but when? Oh, how about the hour before the sermon in the side room?” “Thanks for loaning me that pie tin- I had some spare apples so I baked you an apple pie, why don’t we do a pot luck after the sermon?” “It’d be fun to play soccer. Oh, hey, I’ve got a soccer ball in my car- how about we play on the green by the church after the pot luck?”