Something is off today. It may merely be that it's the first cold day of the season and I got poor sleep. Nevertheless, I have little faith and confidence right now, and am moving by dead reckoning. One step, then another, trusting in my past self, distributed social wisdom, and the divine.
About a week ago I went up to the Pacific Northwest and attended an event called Cascade Camp. The main reason was that this group of beings is a) fully outside my usual spheres and b) seemed like they'd have interesting thoughts on building intentional community/intentional communities (building stronger local bonds was, after all, partly the point of the event). I talked to everyone I could about this and wrote down what they said. Here is what I learned.
One of the big important things that people told me about was that the hard thing isn't finding a lot of people interested in your thing, it's about finding the right people, and avoiding the wrong ones.
Having a long filter is important. Unfortunately, it's easier to filter than train. Invite organizers to your events. Consider "aligned vectors of neurodivergence." Find collaborators for specific projects. (It's easier to go from working together with someone -> being friends with them than the other way around.) Think about the life phases of people you want to include. Structural reasons select people out, possibly unintentionally. For example, one person I talked to is in "Dad Mode" after 5pm. If you're hosting a bar meetup that's not explicitly kid-friendly, he won't be there. To find the right people, work together with them in smaller ways.
Sometimes someone isn't a good fit for the space and all the cool people leave because of them, even though no rules were broken. That means you've failed. It's better to avoid this if possible. It's easier to filter ahead of time than to kick someone out. Consider different “rings of exposure.” E.g. home potlucks as “ring 0.” It's a smaller group, and easier to kick people out because it's your space. Then have bigger, public facing events for finding/checking out new folks. There needs to be someone who holds the responsibility of “outgrouping” people who are not a good fit. Organizer is the person with this responsibility by default, but they should delegate if this is going to be hard for them. (Related, identify your own strengths+what you don't want to do. Think about who can do it better, assign that role to them.) There should be a bouncerish person who will pull others aside, talk about issues, talk to a person's friends about how to best approach them, get coffee with them+say what needs said, ultimately tell them not to come back if necessary.
Sometimes someone actually does something harmful, and you have to have a process for dealing with this. It's better to figure out what this looks like ahead of time so it doesn't feel as personal. Exclusion is unfortunately a fact of life. This shit is hard but really, really important. I keep hearing the same thing from others in different contexts.
This group (tpot) has a distributed event structure called Office Hours. It seems very well suited for them, to condense distributed online community into nodes of local community. The idea is simple: post up at a coffee shop at same time every week, have an easily visible totem so people know they've found the right group, post about it. It seems like an excellent first-pass filter for finding people for other stuff, a great way to keep pathways for serendipity open. I am not sure if it is at all immediately applicable for the types of things I am wanting to do. Something like it may work, with adaptation.
I'm publishing this a few weeks after most of it was written. Like most of my work, it's incomplete and will remain so. Hopefully there is something of value to someone, hopefully if I fail someone else will be able to take pieces from me and do what must be done. I have many threads I was given at this event to follow up on, and I will do so in the coming days/weeks. We are still at step 1 of this process which is "talk to absolutely everyone about it, and ask them who I should talk to next." I will try and keep writing down what I learn.