Video calls have phenomenally lowered the cost of conversations, but most of us don’t use them much. The remaining frictions seem to mostly be soft, etiquette and social-anxiety related. As such, I think that developing some sort of generic protocol for reaching out and having video calls would be helpful. Scripts reduce anxiety about the proper thing to do.
Some ideas in that vein:
Calls should last no more than 90 minutes to avoid burnout and feelings that calls are a virtuous obligation more than a fun opportunity.
More generally, calls should end once someone runs out of energy, and the affordance to end the call without hurt feelings should exist. More total calls exist if everyone is really enjoying them! We care about this more than awkwardness for a few seconds!
Reaching out to people and scheduling. This can induce ugh fields when the video call is made to feel like more like scheduling a meeting than a casual exploration that maybe there is some value here. People in our community care a lot about being on time, and not wasting another person’s time. These tendencies both add friction to more exploratory interaction. Example: “Hey, I’d be interested in a brief chat about X with you whenever we’re both free, you can ping me at these times, alternately, are there good times to ping you to check if you are free?”
People might feel tempted to stick to virtuous topics when reaching out, which is fine, but everything goes better if it’s also a topic you genuinely care a lot about. This makes for better conversations, which reinforces the act of having conversations etc.
Variability tolerance. This whole thing works much better if you go into it being okay with many of your conversations not leading to large, actionable insights. Lots more cross-connections in the EA movement serve more than just immediate benefits. These conversations can lay the groundwork for further cross connections in the future as you build a richer map of who is interested in what and we can help each other make the most fruitful connections.
Why not just emails since asynchronous is even easier? The de facto state of email is that we impose a quality standard on them that makes them onerous to write. Conversations, in contrast, have a much easier time of staying in a casual, exploratory mode that is conducive to quickly homing in on the areas where you can have the most fruitful information transfer.
Lastly, the value of more video calls happening is likely higher value than an intuitive guess would estimate. Myself and many people I have spoken with have had the experience of unsticking projects in ways we didn’t even realize they were stuck after a short call with someone else interested in the area.
If you would like practice, please reach out to me for a skype call on facebook. :)
Video calls could help overcome geographic splintering of EAs. For example, I’ve been involved in EA for 5 years and I still haven’t met many bay area EAs because I’ve always been put off going by the cost of flights from the UK.
I’ve considered skyping people but here’s what puts me off:
Many EAs defend their time against meetings because they’re busy. I worry that I’d be imposing by asking for a skype
I feel bad asking for a skype without a clear purpose
Arranging and scheduling a meeting feels like work, not social
However, at house parties I’ve talked to the very same people I’d feel awkward about asking to skype with because house parties overcome these issues.
The ideal would be to somehow create the characteristics of a house party over the internet:
Several people available
You can join in with and peel off from groups
You can overhear other conversations and then join in
There are ways to easily and inoffensively end a conversation when it’s run its course
You can join in with a group that contains some people you know and some people you don’t
The start time and end time are fuzzy so you can join in when you want
You can randomly decide to go without much planning, and can back out without telling anyone
Some things that have come closer to this than a normal skype:
The complice EA study hall: this has chat every pomodoro break. It’s informal, optional, doesn’t require arranging, and involves several people. It’s really nice but it’s only in pomodoro breaks and is via chat rather than voice.
Phone calls and skypes with close friends and family where it’s not seen as weird to randomly phone them
Maybe a MVP would be to set up a google hangouts party with multiple hangouts. Or I wonder if there’s some better software out there designed for this purpose.
The meetings framing is one of the things I mean. The reference class of meetings is low value. What I’m proposing is that the current threshold for “a big enough chance of being useful to risk a 30 minute skype call” is set too high and that more video calls should happen on the margin. I don’t think these should necessarily be thought of as meetings with clear agendas. Exploratory conversations are there to discover if there is any value, not exploit known value from the first minute.
I agree about the house party parameters. I’d be interested in efforts to host a regular virtual meetup. VR solutions are likely still a couple years off from being reasonably pleasant to use casually (phones rather than dedicated headsets, since most will not have dedicated hardware, but mid-range phones will be VR capable soon)
Virtual meetups seem like they would be good, but in order to gain momentum they need a person who can commit to being on at a certain time, and I currently don’t have that.
I would guess that monthly would work well. Too frequent lowers people’s inclination to show up.
Tinychat has the lowest friction logistics last I checked.
Video calls have phenomenally lowered the cost of conversations, but most of us don’t use them much. The remaining frictions seem to mostly be soft, etiquette and social-anxiety related. As such, I think that developing some sort of generic protocol for reaching out and having video calls would be helpful. Scripts reduce anxiety about the proper thing to do.
Some ideas in that vein:
Calls should last no more than 90 minutes to avoid burnout and feelings that calls are a virtuous obligation more than a fun opportunity.
More generally, calls should end once someone runs out of energy, and the affordance to end the call without hurt feelings should exist. More total calls exist if everyone is really enjoying them! We care about this more than awkwardness for a few seconds!
Reaching out to people and scheduling. This can induce ugh fields when the video call is made to feel like more like scheduling a meeting than a casual exploration that maybe there is some value here. People in our community care a lot about being on time, and not wasting another person’s time. These tendencies both add friction to more exploratory interaction. Example: “Hey, I’d be interested in a brief chat about X with you whenever we’re both free, you can ping me at these times, alternately, are there good times to ping you to check if you are free?”
People might feel tempted to stick to virtuous topics when reaching out, which is fine, but everything goes better if it’s also a topic you genuinely care a lot about. This makes for better conversations, which reinforces the act of having conversations etc.
Variability tolerance. This whole thing works much better if you go into it being okay with many of your conversations not leading to large, actionable insights. Lots more cross-connections in the EA movement serve more than just immediate benefits. These conversations can lay the groundwork for further cross connections in the future as you build a richer map of who is interested in what and we can help each other make the most fruitful connections.
Why not just emails since asynchronous is even easier? The de facto state of email is that we impose a quality standard on them that makes them onerous to write. Conversations, in contrast, have a much easier time of staying in a casual, exploratory mode that is conducive to quickly homing in on the areas where you can have the most fruitful information transfer.
Lastly, the value of more video calls happening is likely higher value than an intuitive guess would estimate. Myself and many people I have spoken with have had the experience of unsticking projects in ways we didn’t even realize they were stuck after a short call with someone else interested in the area.
If you would like practice, please reach out to me for a skype call on facebook. :)
Video calls could help overcome geographic splintering of EAs. For example, I’ve been involved in EA for 5 years and I still haven’t met many bay area EAs because I’ve always been put off going by the cost of flights from the UK.
I’ve considered skyping people but here’s what puts me off:
Many EAs defend their time against meetings because they’re busy. I worry that I’d be imposing by asking for a skype
I feel bad asking for a skype without a clear purpose
Arranging and scheduling a meeting feels like work, not social
However, at house parties I’ve talked to the very same people I’d feel awkward about asking to skype with because house parties overcome these issues.
The ideal would be to somehow create the characteristics of a house party over the internet:
Several people available
You can join in with and peel off from groups
You can overhear other conversations and then join in
There are ways to easily and inoffensively end a conversation when it’s run its course
You can join in with a group that contains some people you know and some people you don’t
The start time and end time are fuzzy so you can join in when you want
You can randomly decide to go without much planning, and can back out without telling anyone
Some things that have come closer to this than a normal skype:
The complice EA study hall: this has chat every pomodoro break. It’s informal, optional, doesn’t require arranging, and involves several people. It’s really nice but it’s only in pomodoro breaks and is via chat rather than voice.
Phone calls and skypes with close friends and family where it’s not seen as weird to randomly phone them
Maybe a MVP would be to set up a google hangouts party with multiple hangouts. Or I wonder if there’s some better software out there designed for this purpose.
The meetings framing is one of the things I mean. The reference class of meetings is low value. What I’m proposing is that the current threshold for “a big enough chance of being useful to risk a 30 minute skype call” is set too high and that more video calls should happen on the margin. I don’t think these should necessarily be thought of as meetings with clear agendas. Exploratory conversations are there to discover if there is any value, not exploit known value from the first minute.
I agree about the house party parameters. I’d be interested in efforts to host a regular virtual meetup. VR solutions are likely still a couple years off from being reasonably pleasant to use casually (phones rather than dedicated headsets, since most will not have dedicated hardware, but mid-range phones will be VR capable soon)
I agree that changing the framing away from meetings would be good, I’m just not sure how to do that.
Do you fancy running a virtual party?
Virtual meetups seem like they would be good, but in order to gain momentum they need a person who can commit to being on at a certain time, and I currently don’t have that.
I would guess that monthly would work well. Too frequent lowers people’s inclination to show up.
Tinychat has the lowest friction logistics last I checked.