I’d definitely be interested to read it!
luminosity
Karma: 911
Venues are definitely a problem—we’re lucky enough to have a relatively central humanist group who let us hire out their meeting space once a month, but occasionally it has been difficult to scramble to find an alternative.
I wonder if there’d be some value in having a list of suggested ways to find a venue for people organising meetup groups.
Did you get people that did crossover from these meetups to the others? It seems like a more lightweight / fun topic like this might be good for letting people get involved more easily?
How did you go about finding people to come to your meetups? Pre-existing friends? LW site postings? Something else?
When you say most of the original people moved away, do you mean the group stopped meeting, or its meetings acquired new members and a different focus?
Do you track where new people come from? I’m wondering about what channels it makes sense to focus on maintaining a presence in. (Hadn’t thought of doing it on r/ssc)
Social meetups
Shortly after we started back up, we ran intermittent social meetups, such as a night out at laser tag, or a walk over the Sydney harbour bridge, followed by a picnic. These were pretty enjoyable, but organisation fell through and these lapsed. We’re currently thinking about how we want to start these back up.
Dinner meetups
We have a monthly meetup at an RSL in Sydney—we’ve found this is a good venue, as people who want to can get food and drinks, but not everyone needs to. At a cafe there is more pressure to have to make purchases over time if you’re taking up their floor space.
This was the first meetup we ran when the Less Wrong Sydney group resumed meeting—at first we ran them with a focus on group discussions, and talking about a particular topic, but we found that often a topic was more of a reason for people to stay away, than for people to come. With the advent of the dojos, there wasn’t as much pressure for this to deliver on applied rationality, and so it has turned into more of a group discussion space.
We’re currently in the middle of an experiment of trying to drive people to these meetups from a meetup.com group—if people seem interested, we can then invite them to come along to the dojos also.
Rationality Dojos
We started these off using material taken from CFAR workshops—gradually over time related topics such as Kegan’s Immunity to Change have been introduced.
We started off running these as one two hour session, all given by the same person, but after a year we switched to a new format, where we break off into two—three segments run by different people. This keeps people’s attention better, reduces the amount of work individual presenters do, and allows us to experiment with new material without having to worry that if it doesn’t work out the whole session will be rendered pointless.
There’s a strong focus in the dojos of doing work on real problems people have—we want to avoid sessions where people give talks, everyone feels enlightened, but people then don’t go ahead and use the new knowledge. We also take advantage of the monthly timing to allow people to lay down goals for the next month that they’ll be made accountable for at the next meetup.
Less Wrong Sydney
We’ve run three different types of meetups over the last several years, each of which will get a sub-comment below.
The date was originally incorrectly set to 1 May instead of 5 June. This is now fixed.
Disregard the time, the meetup starts at 4, and the post won’t correct.
For those who wish to come along we will also have our usual group dinner after the dojo ends, around 6pm.
Fair call on my intellectual laziness in not performing the brainstorming myself. Point taken. However, if you are noticing a pattern of many people doing this over time, it seems like this is something article authors could take into account to get more impact out of their articles. Unless the point is to make the person reading do the brainstorming to build that habit, then the time of many readers can be saved by the person who wrote the article, and presumably has already passed this point and thus put in the time sharing tips or a call to action on how to get started.
I want to stress that I don’t consider this an obligation on the article author. If Julia, or anyone else, doesn’t want to put in that time, then we can be grateful (and I am) that they have shared with us the time they have already. However, I do view it as an opportunity for authors who wish to have a greater impact.
On a a more concrete level, thanks for sharing your thought process on this topic. Very useful.
One extra note I’d add. We’ve had a few events where another group, or a fraction thereof, and our group combined for the event. I’d recommend strongly against these unless you think there is significant demographic overlap, as I felt it strongly diluted the event, both in terms of group feel and also in terms of group focus.
I love the list of predictions, but I also feel fairly confident in predicting that this post won’t prompt me to actually make more (or more useful) predictions. Do you have any tips on building the habit of making predictions?
Location has been updated.
Note: 4pm not 5pm, time widget is misbehaving.
The reason I really love Spotify style services is that they massively reduce the friction of trying new things out. I’ve found a lot more music I enjoy of various different types over the last two years of using rdio / spotify than in any time period previous to that, because the cost of trying something new is as simple as typing in a search query.
Note that the address has been updated due to an unfortunate double booking.