The Austin Schelling Day celebration was small- four of us eating dinner together and then sitting around a table, watching the sun set through the windows as we shared.
I felt it worked very well for its intended purpose, of bringing us closer together and helping people talk about things they otherwise wouldn’t talk about. The attendees were the most regular attendees to the normal meetups, so I don’t think it helped broaden the connections of the group much.
For our location, we met at majus’s home; he’s a software engineer near the end of his career, and his house is as nice as you would expect from that. I’m a graduate student, and so my apartment, where we host game nights, is also as nice as you would expect (that is to say, it isn’t). I felt that having the location upgrade did make for a better experience.
It went much longer than I expected; I had estimated maybe an hour for dinner, and then about 5*3*n+15 minutes for the celebration. Dinner went more like an hour and a half (but part of that was we arrived a bit late, and then food needed another 20-30 minutes to be finished), and then we spent a bit less than 3 hours on the celebration itself- which translates to ~45 minutes of talking per person!
Part of this was that I put no effort into enforcing time limits, and I think the other part was that people felt that with a small group they could take as long as they wanted. With 4 people, the “there should be at most 2-3 reactions to each person’s sharing” rule sort of turned into “everyone reacts to each person’s sharing,” and there seemed to be several instances of a person taking 2-4 minutes to share, then a 1 minute response, then a 30-60 second response to that response, then another response, response to that response, then the last response, a response to that, and then we moved on.
I made the mistake of washing the raspberries perhaps a little too vigorously, and they mostly disintegrated / looked terrible, but still tasted alright. I was expecting the snacks which didn’t make it into the bowl to get eaten also- but, as it turns out, three ‘scoops’ of snacks per person (we added snacks of multiple types if it crossed multiple categories) turned out to be roughly the right amount at the end.
I had the same experience with my event, of it devolving into responses to responses. There were 9 of us though, so I felt really obligated to try to stop it.
The Austin Schelling Day celebration was small- four of us eating dinner together and then sitting around a table, watching the sun set through the windows as we shared.
I felt it worked very well for its intended purpose, of bringing us closer together and helping people talk about things they otherwise wouldn’t talk about. The attendees were the most regular attendees to the normal meetups, so I don’t think it helped broaden the connections of the group much.
For our location, we met at majus’s home; he’s a software engineer near the end of his career, and his house is as nice as you would expect from that. I’m a graduate student, and so my apartment, where we host game nights, is also as nice as you would expect (that is to say, it isn’t). I felt that having the location upgrade did make for a better experience.
It went much longer than I expected; I had estimated maybe an hour for dinner, and then about 5*3*n+15 minutes for the celebration. Dinner went more like an hour and a half (but part of that was we arrived a bit late, and then food needed another 20-30 minutes to be finished), and then we spent a bit less than 3 hours on the celebration itself- which translates to ~45 minutes of talking per person!
Part of this was that I put no effort into enforcing time limits, and I think the other part was that people felt that with a small group they could take as long as they wanted. With 4 people, the “there should be at most 2-3 reactions to each person’s sharing” rule sort of turned into “everyone reacts to each person’s sharing,” and there seemed to be several instances of a person taking 2-4 minutes to share, then a 1 minute response, then a 30-60 second response to that response, then another response, response to that response, then the last response, a response to that, and then we moved on.
I made the mistake of washing the raspberries perhaps a little too vigorously, and they mostly disintegrated / looked terrible, but still tasted alright. I was expecting the snacks which didn’t make it into the bowl to get eaten also- but, as it turns out, three ‘scoops’ of snacks per person (we added snacks of multiple types if it crossed multiple categories) turned out to be roughly the right amount at the end.
I had the same experience with my event, of it devolving into responses to responses. There were 9 of us though, so I felt really obligated to try to stop it.