One possible technological solution to the "telepresent people have trouble finding and participating in regular conversations, (which may actually be doable today, although it would require quite a bit of preparation and expense) is a robot controllable over the internet. (I.e. something vaguely Roomba/ RD-D2 shaped, with a laptop/camera sitting on top of it, piloted via some internet website)
This would have the added benefit of "Robots are cool", which means people would be more likely, not less, to communicate with whoever's displayed on the robot's laptop.
Building a robot is also a pretty cool thing to do, even if it turns out that using it for telepresence still isn't very effective.
NYC tried out the Sunk Kata, and it went pretty well. It is not quite ready for public consumption (pieces of the power point notes are vague and uninformative) but you're already vaguely familiar with the material it does make for an easily focused meetup.
Another thing NYC does is "TED Talk Night," wherein we pick 5-10 TED talks. We watch each one, talk about it for a while, and then move on to the next one. This is good because A) TED talks are usually informative and entertaining, B) they prompt interesting discussions we wouldn't have otherwise had, C) having a line-up of them means that as soon as the conversation starts to flag, we can start the next one. And for online meetups, there's D) Google Hangouts come with a youtube channel that lets you all watch video at the same time.
I think this is the sort of thing that we would want to work around people's schedules for. Maybe someone interested in organizing this could make a post with at when is good or doodle, and see when the highest number of people could show up.
I was not at the virtual meetup yesterday, so I can't speak to the quality of that. But I have been involved in virtual-only meetups with other LWers. Aaron is right about not having critical mass, but to the best of my knowledge there's still 3-5 of us in my group who aren't currently meeting* but would be potentially interested in doing so.
*Mostly due to us all being too busy to prepare and run a single topic/workshop, and without that the social interaction is pleasant but not quite good enough to make time for
PURELY online meetups may be viable
Taking into account Julia's feedback any kind of online meetups would do well to include two or three people who had been acquaintances before so they feel comfortable talking to each other. Also as I mentioned before smaller might be better, 5 or 6 people who agreed in advance to stick around during that timeslot.
Yesterday the East Coast Megameetup experimented with a Google Hangout that gave non-locals a chance to interact. Results were mixed. The hangout got off to a late start due to technical difficulties and insufficient redundant planning.
Comments from the original discussion topic:
Pretty interesting demonstration of feasibility. It has convinced me that (small) virtual meets would be practical. If it wasn't for the late hour (and waking up my host for tonight) I'd probably stay around for a bit longer. I do wonder if anything like a rationality workshop or set of group exercises could be done in this way.
Feedback: I think the fun/interesting thing about being in a house with ~25 LessWrongers is being able to circulate around and jump in on conversations that sound interesting. Skype/google hangouts, however good the eventual sound quality, can't recreate this because you can only talk to the person who comes over to the screen. Even if they're talking about something besides the poor sound quality, it feels pretty forced. So I don't think technical fixes are going to improve the experience much.
I believe Konkvistador showed up earlier in the day and Julia later.
We ended up running three presentations between 4 PM and 6 PM (Nutrition, Leverage's Plan, and Consensus Techniques). Later we attempted to have group discussions that got the non-local people more involved. Anyone who attended, I'd appreciate feedback. My own impressions:
1) Make sure you have a good, hardline internet connection. (We had this during the presentations, tried to move the laptops to a quieter room for discussion and found the intermittent disconnects to be unworkable)
2) Telepresent Presentations are viable, but require better planning.
The first two presentations seemed to go pretty well. The sound and video were not great, but the speaker could be understood and the powerpoints were simple white text on a black background, so they showed up reasonably on camera. The third speaker was a little quiet and the slides, while visible in the room, didn't show up very well (even using the screen-sharing capability - the image still turned out a little blurry).
The computer was kept on mute, but we had two people engaging with the non-locals via chat. Non-locals could submit questions for us to read aloud, and then have the speaker respond to. This seemed like a workable format. Better audio/video would help it, and in the absence of better video, speakers should prepare extremely bold, easy to read presentations. We should also try to post those presentations online so people can download them and read them on their home computer in higher definition.
3) Discussions between locals and nonlocals are not viable (and probably never will be).
Julia's comment is spot on. I think the experience would be improved slightly by having a more focused, better prepared discussion, higher quality feed and displaying the Hangout people more prominently on a large screen with big speakers so people noticed them more. But it would still probably feel a little forced and awkward.
4) PURELY online meetups may be viable
While they never really engaged with the Megameetup, the people on the hangout did engage with each other. One of my motivations was to find a way to get Less Wrongers who are isolated geographically more involved in community. Konkvistador suggested small virtual meetups, and that sounds plausible to me. It was independently brought up during the Community discussion, by Aaron Tucker, who had briefly tried it in the past. It failed due to insufficient critical mass (I think there were never more than 2-3 people), and due to irregular scheduling. But if a group of Less Wrongers wanted to make a serious go at it I think it's workable.
Designing virtual meetups would come with their own challenges. They'd still need a topic to remain focused (real-space meetups get much higher attendance when they have a specific task to address). Rationality workshops are one possibility.
5) Other potential uses probably require a few more years before technology catches up.
I think we could discover other uses for telepresence, but it would require some experimentation, and most of those experiments would fail, *in addition* to us still have to be dealing with poor sound quality and intermittent connections. I think the latter things will get solved by the progress of technology. I have vague ideas I'd like to explore, but I will probably wait a while.
In the meantime, in summary: