The “Office Hours” Meetup (2014)

I spent a few years co-organizing a weekly "civic hacknight" event for technologists, designers, policy wonks, public servants, lawyers, and any engaged citizens who cared to show up. Trying to target each of their needs with a single sort of presentation felt like a red herring. We'd have 40-120 people, pitching and/or joining community projects, we'd change venues every month, and we'd have a "warm-up" speaker and pizza to loosen up the vibe (no more than 20-min, incl Q&A). http://civictech.ca/

The unstructured formula is really powerful imho. At its best, it emulates the power of open source, where you don't try to anticipate who's the teacher and who's the student -- you assume everyone is both, depending on which part of the room they're talking to, and how loudly :) In my view, you just need to protect and amplify that fractal nature of the space, allowing it to operate at as many different levels as possible: individual self-intros to the room, the time-boxed room-wide presentation, the open-floor for pitches before work-time, the informal non-pitch convos when ppl don't join groups, the two people catching up together in a corner or on the walk to post-drinks. You protect it all. You don't let the people who love the speakers turn it into a speaker series (even when the calibre of speakers maybe makes you think they deserve more time). You don't let the hackers dismiss the people who just show for the speaker, or who just talk and don't work. etc etc. You protect and advocate for all levels of interaction, and don't valourize one over the other

So much can happen when you design events that resist collapsing the possibilities of a space into a single narrative through-line -- if you preserve a point cloud for sampling by all, instead of pretending you can thread a single story through it. Single narratives are what you build for dosing into individual human minds when you have a set outcome or goal, but it's not what we should foster when we're trying to do computation on difficult, undefined and complex systems.