At REACH we have a meditation meetup every Tuesday. Early on we decided the format should be a combination of doing the thing, talking about the thing, and talking with each other in that order. We experimented a bit before we settled on it, and basically found it was the format that seemed to work best, for some subjective, non-explicit measure of “best”.
I think it works because first you have to show up and do the thing we are here to do. Then there is time to have directed conversation within a more limited scope so everyone has the opportunity to participate. Finally we come to the socializing, and it comes at the end for multiple reasons (would get in the way of the goal of the meetup; able to scale longer or shorter with the conditions of the week). So in your model it’s climbing up high first, then slowly coming down in a way that lets you coast down to the valley of hanging out, all in one meetup so even if it’s your first time you get the whole experience.
I’m not sure how well this can generalize since we are lucky that we are showing up every week to do the same activity, but it might be extensible to other sorts of meetups, rationalist or EA or not.
At REACH we have a meditation meetup every Tuesday. Early on we decided the format should be a combination of doing the thing, talking about the thing, and talking with each other in that order. We experimented a bit before we settled on it, and basically found it was the format that seemed to work best, for some subjective, non-explicit measure of “best”.
I think it works because first you have to show up and do the thing we are here to do. Then there is time to have directed conversation within a more limited scope so everyone has the opportunity to participate. Finally we come to the socializing, and it comes at the end for multiple reasons (would get in the way of the goal of the meetup; able to scale longer or shorter with the conditions of the week). So in your model it’s climbing up high first, then slowly coming down in a way that lets you coast down to the valley of hanging out, all in one meetup so even if it’s your first time you get the whole experience.
I’m not sure how well this can generalize since we are lucky that we are showing up every week to do the same activity, but it might be extensible to other sorts of meetups, rationalist or EA or not.