I actually think this happens fairly frequently, although may be happening sort of invisibly:
I think it most concretely happened at the last Winter and Summer Solstice – in this case it was explicitly due to event insurance concerns and explicit attendee caps.
More often and more generally: I think, esp for medium-sized parties (basically any time it’s a private FB event, and the room ends up pretty full), I think it’s often the case that, before you got to the point where people notice and feel excluded, there’s a pre-emptive pass where only a smaller subset of people get invited in the first place. The competition is happening quietly in the social network.
Ah, yeah, it did happen at last summer’s solstice, I had forgotten. I was not involved with the winter solstice and didn’t know about similar problems there.
I do agree that house parties are often selective, but I have never seen an event with a topic (as opposed to a purely social party) have more interest than the space allowed, which was the category of thing that was in my head when I said “event” above. I consider house parties to be more about hanging out with friends than about “the community” or whatnot.
Yeah, agreed that events that are “expecting effort” on the part of participants don’t usually have this problem.
The place where it seems most relevant are events that are sort of on the border between “hanging out with friends” and “hanging out with community” – house parties that play a large role in determining the overall social scene for Berkeley, where, say, 50-100 people get invited, but there 200 people in the area.
(This is not me saying anyone is doing anything wrong, just, it’s a thing to be aware of)
Yeah. For me, events at REACH are a good way to get to know new people and decide if I trust them enough to invite them to more private events. I think a lot of folks in the community are already at capacity for how many social connections they can keep up and so don’t end up wanting to get to know new people.
I think some of this stems from the fact that many people seem to prefer talking to folks one on one which makes it hard to parallelize social time. My personal preference is for groups of 5-10, sometimes within a larger social setting, and have been sorta trying to impose this preference on others through doing things at REACH :P
I think a lot of folks in the community are already at capacity for how many social connections they can keep up and so don’t end up wanting to get to know new people.
That’s basically the dynamic I was referring to. You don’t have that to the same extend with less people in a community.
Yuppers. I definitely with the addition of REACH has a good chance of reducing or eliminating this problem – having lots of public facing events solves a lot of the issues.
The winter solstice last year used the same venue it had used the previous year, but the venue imposed a new, lower restriction on the maximum number of attendees, due to some new interpretation of the fire code or something. As a result, tickets did sell out. (I wasn’t close enough to organization last year to know how last-minute the change was, but my impression was that there was some scrambling in response.)
This year a new venue is being sought that can better accommodate the number of people who want to attend.
I actually think this happens fairly frequently, although may be happening sort of invisibly:
I think it most concretely happened at the last Winter and Summer Solstice – in this case it was explicitly due to event insurance concerns and explicit attendee caps.
More often and more generally: I think, esp for medium-sized parties (basically any time it’s a private FB event, and the room ends up pretty full), I think it’s often the case that, before you got to the point where people notice and feel excluded, there’s a pre-emptive pass where only a smaller subset of people get invited in the first place. The competition is happening quietly in the social network.
Ah, yeah, it did happen at last summer’s solstice, I had forgotten. I was not involved with the winter solstice and didn’t know about similar problems there.
I do agree that house parties are often selective, but I have never seen an event with a topic (as opposed to a purely social party) have more interest than the space allowed, which was the category of thing that was in my head when I said “event” above. I consider house parties to be more about hanging out with friends than about “the community” or whatnot.
Yeah, agreed that events that are “expecting effort” on the part of participants don’t usually have this problem.
The place where it seems most relevant are events that are sort of on the border between “hanging out with friends” and “hanging out with community” – house parties that play a large role in determining the overall social scene for Berkeley, where, say, 50-100 people get invited, but there 200 people in the area.
(This is not me saying anyone is doing anything wrong, just, it’s a thing to be aware of)
Yeah. For me, events at REACH are a good way to get to know new people and decide if I trust them enough to invite them to more private events. I think a lot of folks in the community are already at capacity for how many social connections they can keep up and so don’t end up wanting to get to know new people.
I think some of this stems from the fact that many people seem to prefer talking to folks one on one which makes it hard to parallelize social time. My personal preference is for groups of 5-10, sometimes within a larger social setting, and have been sorta trying to impose this preference on others through doing things at REACH :P
That’s basically the dynamic I was referring to. You don’t have that to the same extend with less people in a community.
Yuppers. I definitely with the addition of REACH has a good chance of reducing or eliminating this problem – having lots of public facing events solves a lot of the issues.
The winter solstice last year used the same venue it had used the previous year, but the venue imposed a new, lower restriction on the maximum number of attendees, due to some new interpretation of the fire code or something. As a result, tickets did sell out. (I wasn’t close enough to organization last year to know how last-minute the change was, but my impression was that there was some scrambling in response.)
This year a new venue is being sought that can better accommodate the number of people who want to attend.