I've been thinking a lot about gatherings. Being disabled makes it difficult for me to attend gatherings in person, and I tend to do better when communication is text-based. Poorly run meetings drive me nuts, but a good gathering of people (even virtually) really stimulates and nourishes me. So I've been thinking about ways I can make that happen and happen well.

Reading list

Maggie Appleton's piece on Gathering Structures has some good thoughts on the topic. They're practical and address some of the burdens that organizing a gathering can entail. But they are focused on recurring in-person gatherings of mostly strangers. Good thoughts about logistics and social dynamics and how not to get burned out. There's a lot of discussion about format here.

In The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker talks about making a gathering meaningful, impactful, memorable. Her advice ranges from defining the purpose of the gathering to deciding where to host it and who to invite to short-duration rules to preparing the guests to openings and closings. A lot of the content in the book is centered on connecting not just host to guest, but guests to each other.

I've read Máirín Duffy's article about managing panelists and the tech involved in hosting a fully-online conference using only open-source software. This is mostly a retrospective and focuses a lot on the technology involved and only somewhat on the social aspects. But in that regard it's a good counterbalance to the above that focuses specially on an online gathering. Parker talks a lot about how important venue is in helping frame the gathering for its intended purpose, and what is the venue of an online gathering but the tech stack it runs on?

TodoGroup.org has another article where technology is more the topic than the venue, though it talks about both in-person and online events. Not technical focus but talks about things like sponsorships, promotion, codes of conduct.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's work on disability community preparedness has a lot to bring to the conversation as well. Fixing social problems requires gathering people together for that purpose, and there can be no revolution if it's not accessible. Gatherings need to be accessible for people who roll, people who have vocal tics, people who stim, people who are immunocompromised, people who need quiet to be able to follow conversations, people who are photosensitive, people who need a lot of light to see. Conflicting Access Needs are always going to be a problem. Online venues present their own collection of accessibility issues. But disabled communities have been solving these problems for as long as there have been people, and there's a lot we can learn from them (often, them is us).

Current gatherings

I've been to plenty of work meetings. I've attended conventions. I've attended and lead training seminars, completed university degrees, and run a non-profit. I've started an online support group for my grad school program. I've focused a lot on the logistics of these gatherings, less on the purpose, and even less on making sure the people who show up are bringing the self I need at them. There's a lot of room for me to improve, both when hosting and when attending.

New gatherings

But reading and thinking about this, especially given my recent change in circumstances, I'm starting to look for opportunities to try out these strategies by creating new gatherings. Maybe using is and Discord, my MLIS support group could do an online silent reading Study groups of a journal article, each person writing marginalia as they go through it, learning from each other. Maybe my next birthday party could be a convening of friends to tell me each a story of how their life suddenly changed and how they dealt with that, giving them a chance to get to know one another better as well. I'm definitely interested in how to better facilitate online gatherings effectively, since that's the kind that's easiest for me to attend. Like Appleton says, no one is going to create the gathering you want to have, so you best get on it yourself.

Gathering authority

Appleton points out that you don't have to be an official event planner to host a gathering, and has notes about how to rotate that position to avoid burnout and how to keep the load on the host low by design. Parker points out that the host has inherent power within the gathering, and encourages hosts not to abdicate it (creating a power vacuum) nor be tyrannical with it (blasting over your guests and their wishes), but to use it responsibly to the benefit of the guests in furtherance of the gathering's purpose. Both of them, directly and indirectly, discuss power structures within gatherings, whether it's channeled by Robert's Rules of Order or an MC keeping a presentation to exactly 5 minutes.

But in thinking of gatherings as something a Community does, power and hierarchy take on a different implication. A gathering of a community is a physical manifestation of the existing power structures within that community. In a company, the CEO calls the meeting, and all the executives and managers sit around the board room table sorted by pecking order, with individual contributors lining the walls standing room only. But if you're participating in a mutual aid group or other intentionally-democratic or non-hierarchical community, it's important to consider how that gathering process may create a power structure, or how it may be perceived by outsiders or newcomers.

Random notes (TODO: clean this up into something coherent)

and thinking about how it ties in to the collaborative reading idea above. Obviously meetups like these can span a lot more than just discussing a particular written piece in that particular format, but I think the collaborative reading idea is a good example of something that would fit this structure. I want to do this online, personally, but I guess you could do it in person?

Key points (hers and mine):

Keep overhead to a minimum, so you have time to enjoy the event yourself
Try to share the load, let other people lead and take on responsibilities, rotate hosting, etc
Make it accessible (is hypothes.is accessible?)
You gotta deal with people, so be careful who you invite and practice how to deal with them if needed (art of gathering calls this closing doors)
Pick a format that promotes the kind of activities you want (7 minute demos, hypothes.is) (Art of Gathering calls this embodiment of place?)
Let people sign up to present, or demo, or pick a paper and lead the discussion
If no one has something to demo or talk about or whatever, you can just not meet up
Unconference wall and fishbowl (are these adaptable to online meetups?)
Start small
You need time, place, intention, people (you don't even have to have all of these to start)
No one is going to make the group you want to be part of

Her open problems list:

Where to meet up? What about if the group is large, ~80 people?
When to meet up? (Crab Fit, Doodle, depend on everyone's calendars being compatible, publicly accessible, up to date, and comprehensive. Loomio had something for this but it felt less developed/integrated)

Communities of Practice in Dalkir, K. (2023). Knowledge management in theory and practice (4th ed.). MIT Press. chapter 5:

Visitors, Novices, Regulars, Leaders, Elders

And further

champion, sponsor, facilitator, practice leader, knowledge service center or office, member

World cafe:

Set the context
Create an inviting third space
Explore questions that matter
Encourage everyone’s contribution
Connect diverse perspectives
Listen together for patterns and insights
Share collective discoveries

Communities of practice

Community?

"CoPs don't just provide access to data and documents, they interconnect the social network of people who produced the knowledge." From Dalkir again.

Wenger-Trayner, E., & Wenger-Trayner, B. (2015, June). Introduction to communities of practice. https://www.wenger-trayner.com/introduction-to-communities-of-practice/

Has applications to learning, term originally coined in the context of apprenticeships.

Time, place, intention (AoG calls this Purpose), people. For the first aid group, time and place were defined by the convention, intention was our role within the convention, and people showed up that wanted to be a part of that. I'm toying with hypothes.is for doing joint readings and discussions at the moment, and would want to host that "event" online, which solves place to an extent (just hypothes.is? or also discord/zoom/irc/matrix/a wiki/something else?). I've got two friends who might be interested in something like that if the work being reviewed was up their alley. But what's the intention, then? Just to have a conversation and each deepen our individual understanding of the material covered? To produce a document with our thoughts on it for our own use, or for publication? To find action items in our own lives and hold each other accountable for following through with them? To provide feedback to the original author(s)? Being clear on the intention would be useful. Finding a time when all three of us could try it out is also a challenge with everything going on in our lives.