In the rationality community people are currently excited about the LessOnline festival. Furthermore, my impression is that similar festivals are generally quite successful: people enjoy them, have stimulating discussions, form new relationships, are exposed to new and interesting ideas, express that they got a lot out of it, etc.
So then, this feels to me like a situation where More Dakka applies. Organize more festivals!
How? Who? I dunno, but these seem like questions worth discussing.
Trying to organize a festival probably isn’t risky. It doesn’t seem like it’d involve too much time or money.
I don’t think that’s true. I’ve co-organized one one weekend-long retreat in a small hostel for ~50 people, and the cost was ~$5k. Me & the co-organizers probably spent ~50h in total on organizing the event, as volunteers.
I was envisioning that you can organize a festival incrementally, investing more time and money into it as you receive more and more validation, and that taking this approach would de-risk it to the point where overall, it’s “not that risky”.
For example, to start off you can email or message a handful of potential attendees. If they aren’t excited by the idea you can stop there, but if they are then you can proceed to start looking into things like cost and logistics. I’m not sure how pragmatic this iterative approach actually is though. What do you think?
Also, it seems to me that you wouldn’t have to actually risk losing any of your own money. I’d imagine that you’d 1) talk to the hostel, agree on a price, have them “hold the spot” for you, 2) get sign ups, 3) pay using the money you get from attendees.
Although now that I think about it I’m realizing that it probably isn’t that simple. For example, the hostel cost ~$5k and maybe the money from the attendees would have covered it all but maybe less attendees signed up than you were expecting and the organizers ended up having to pay out of pocket.
On the other hand, maybe there is funding available for situations like these.
Back then I didn’t try to get the hostel to sign the metaphorical assurance contract with me, maybe that’d work. A good dominant assurance contract website might work as well.
I guess if you go camping together then conferences are pretty scalable, and if I was to organize another event I’d probably try to first message a few people to get a minimal number of attendees together. After all, the spectrum between an extended party and a festival/conference is fluid.
More dakka with festivals
In the rationality community people are currently excited about the LessOnline festival. Furthermore, my impression is that similar festivals are generally quite successful: people enjoy them, have stimulating discussions, form new relationships, are exposed to new and interesting ideas, express that they got a lot out of it, etc.
So then, this feels to me like a situation where More Dakka applies. Organize more festivals!
How? Who? I dunno, but these seem like questions worth discussing.
Some initial thoughts:
Assurance contracts seem like quite the promising tool.
You probably don’t need a hero license to go out and organize a festival.
Trying to organize a festival probably isn’t risky. It doesn’t seem like it’d involve too much time or money.
I don’t think that’s true. I’ve co-organized one one weekend-long retreat in a small hostel for ~50 people, and the cost was ~$5k. Me & the co-organizers probably spent ~50h in total on organizing the event, as volunteers.
I was envisioning that you can organize a festival incrementally, investing more time and money into it as you receive more and more validation, and that taking this approach would de-risk it to the point where overall, it’s “not that risky”.
For example, to start off you can email or message a handful of potential attendees. If they aren’t excited by the idea you can stop there, but if they are then you can proceed to start looking into things like cost and logistics. I’m not sure how pragmatic this iterative approach actually is though. What do you think?
Also, it seems to me that you wouldn’t have to actually risk losing any of your own money. I’d imagine that you’d 1) talk to the hostel, agree on a price, have them “hold the spot” for you, 2) get sign ups, 3) pay using the money you get from attendees.
Although now that I think about it I’m realizing that it probably isn’t that simple. For example, the hostel cost ~$5k and maybe the money from the attendees would have covered it all but maybe less attendees signed up than you were expecting and the organizers ended up having to pay out of pocket.
On the other hand, maybe there is funding available for situations like these.
Back then I didn’t try to get the hostel to sign the metaphorical assurance contract with me, maybe that’d work. A good dominant assurance contract website might work as well.
I guess if you go camping together then conferences are pretty scalable, and if I was to organize another event I’d probably try to first message a few people to get a minimal number of attendees together. After all, the spectrum between an extended party and a festival/conference is fluid.