As I mentioned in some recent Shortform posts, I recently listened to the Bayesian Conspiracy podcast’s episode on the LessOnline festival and it got me thinking.
One thing I think is cool is that Ben Pace was saying how the valuable thing about these festivals isn’t the presentations, it’s the time spent mingling in between the presentations, and so they decided with LessOnline to just ditch the presentations and make it all about mingling. Which got me thinking about mingling.
It seems plausible to me that such mingling can and should happen more online. And I wonder whether an important thing about mingling in the physical world is that, how do I say this, you’re just in the same physical space, next to each other, with nothing else you’re supposed to be doing, and in fact what you’re supposed to be doing is talking to one another.
Well, I guess you’re not supposed to be talking to one another. It’s also cool if you just want to hang out and sip on a drink or something. It’s similar to the office water cooler: it’s cool if you’re just hanging out drinking some water, but it’s also normal to chit chat with your coworkers.
I wonder whether it’d be good to design a virtual watercooler. A digital place that mimicks aspects of the situations I’ve been describing (festivals, office watercoolers).
By being available in the virtual watercooler it’s implied that you’re pretty available to chit chat with, but it’s also cool if you’re just hanging out doing something low key like sipping a drink.
You shouldn’t be doing something more substantial though.
The virtual watercooler should be organized around a certain theme. It should attract a certain group of people and filter out people who don’t fit in. Just like festivals and office water coolers.
In particular, this feels to me like something that might be worth exploring for LessWrong.
Note: I know that there are various Slack and Discord groups but they don’t meet conditions (1) or (2).
I maybe want to clarify: there will still be presentations at LessOnline, we’re just trying to design the event such that they’re clearly more of a secondary thing.
Virtual watercoolers
As I mentioned in some recent Shortform posts, I recently listened to the Bayesian Conspiracy podcast’s episode on the LessOnline festival and it got me thinking.
One thing I think is cool is that Ben Pace was saying how the valuable thing about these festivals isn’t the presentations, it’s the time spent mingling in between the presentations, and so they decided with LessOnline to just ditch the presentations and make it all about mingling. Which got me thinking about mingling.
It seems plausible to me that such mingling can and should happen more online. And I wonder whether an important thing about mingling in the physical world is that, how do I say this, you’re just in the same physical space, next to each other, with nothing else you’re supposed to be doing, and in fact what you’re supposed to be doing is talking to one another.
Well, I guess you’re not supposed to be talking to one another. It’s also cool if you just want to hang out and sip on a drink or something. It’s similar to the office water cooler: it’s cool if you’re just hanging out drinking some water, but it’s also normal to chit chat with your coworkers.
I wonder whether it’d be good to design a virtual watercooler. A digital place that mimicks aspects of the situations I’ve been describing (festivals, office watercoolers).
By being available in the virtual watercooler it’s implied that you’re pretty available to chit chat with, but it’s also cool if you’re just hanging out doing something low key like sipping a drink.
You shouldn’t be doing something more substantial though.
The virtual watercooler should be organized around a certain theme. It should attract a certain group of people and filter out people who don’t fit in. Just like festivals and office water coolers.
In particular, this feels to me like something that might be worth exploring for LessWrong.
Note: I know that there are various Slack and Discord groups but they don’t meet conditions (1) or (2).
I maybe want to clarify: there will still be presentations at LessOnline, we’re just trying to design the event such that they’re clearly more of a secondary thing.