Online LessWrong Community Weekend

From 11th-13th September aspiring rationalists will gather for 3 days of socialising, fun and intellectual exploration. There will be a few pre-planned activities, but most of the content will be unconference style and participant driven.

On Monday, September 6th, participants will be invited to the event Discord and to access the collaborative schedule, to start planning what shall happen the following weekend. Over the week, the schedule will be filled in with workshops, talks and activities.

This is the 7th year of the LessWrong Community Weekend. Those of you who have attended this event before know that the atmosphere and sense of community at these weekends is something really special. If this sounds like something you would enjoy and you have some exciting ideas or skills to contribute, do come along and get involved.

However, as you might have noticed, this year’s event is significantly different in one regard. Normally the LessWrong Community Weekend is an in-person event held in Berlin. This is the first time we’re trying this online, which means new and interesting opportunities to explore. For example, who will program the seal-of-approval bot?

Applications

Apply here before September 4th.

Early applicants will be favoured in the application process.

Payment

This event is free. However I do encourage donations to keep the LessWrong Community Weekend (LWCW) alive for the future.

I believe that most of us wish to come back to the normal, in-person LWCW next year. However, it is unclear if this will happen since the usual organisers are tired of doing all that work for free. If you agree with me that organisers deserve to get paid, then I encourage you to make a donation to the Berlin LessWrong community (who are the ones normally organising the LWCW). This money will be split evenly between retrospectively paying past organisers and be put out as a bounty for future organisers.

Suggested amount: 10-50 Euro depending on your personal budget.

Payment recipient:
LessWrong Deutschland e.V.
IBAN: DE74 8306 5408 0004 8647 19
BIC: GENODEF1SLR
Comment: LWCW Organiser fund

If your bank asks you for the bank’s name and address, this is it:
Deutsche Skatbank
Zweigniederlassung der VR-Bank Altenburger Land eG
Markt 10
04600 Altenburg (Thür.)

Some Platforms we will use

This list is preliminary. If you have better suggestions, please let me know!
(Don’t worry if the list seems long. Most of these work in your browser, so that all you have to do is to follow the link that you will be provided for that activity.)

Discord will be used as the main communications hub for the event. This is where you will go to find all other information. Activities that don’t happen in Discord will be linked to from Discord.
Teamup calendar for collaborative scheduling of activities.
CozyRoom will be the main place to go to for more casual socialising. This platform is under development, so there will be more fun features by the time of the LessWrong Community Weekend. On top of that, the developers of CozyRoom have offered to set up a special server that will allow for more participants to be in the CozyRoom space without running into technical limitations.
Zoom and/or Google Meet. None of the above platforms are great for really large gatherings such as the opening and closing sessions and probably some of the more popular talks. For these things we will use Zoom and/or Google Meet. Which one depends on the number of participants and the needs of these participants.
Icebreaker will be used for speed-friending sessions.
Possibly more…? There are likely to be activities that require some specific platform, e.g. online board games. But activity organisers are discouraged to use anything that requires installation.