random memes }

Active organizing in place of passive participation?

I am trying to tie together a whole lot of threads into a coherent whole. This is going to be rough (very very rough), in the first iterations, under I can better sort things out.

Of late, I have been wandering around, trying random things, trying to get socially reconnected. But I am odd. What I find interesting is not what is most common. That means the existing venues are - for me - just not interesting.

The first part of the problem is the shape of our current suburban society. In fact, there is not a whole lot of society. For reasons that are both too simple and too complex, most folk live in a physical and social environment that promotes silos and isolation. No intention, no design - and not enough understanding of the problem.

Well ... we cannot revamp the physical world, but perhaps through focused choices, intentional action, we can route around what does not work.

Quite a lot of social coherence grows out of incidental interaction - which for the most part just does not happen by default in suburban society. Can we intentionally build social coherence? I think so. There are always a few exceptional actors, but they need a clear plan, and a plan that works. What plan works?

One notion that I find interesting is Stranger Dinners. I suspect that what works for a single 20-something attractive female as a host does not necessary work for another host or age group ... but the base notion is still interesting. The notion of pulling together mostly-unrelated folk for interesting incidental social interaction seems to make some sense - if we can find a simple formula that can be readily replicated, for many hosts.

Pulling folk together outside of our usual silos has to be a primary. Putting together mutually interesting small meetings of dissimilar folk has to be also(?) primary.

Initial Questions:

The above all needs to be reduced to a simple and clear message.