Your "no organizer" case sounds more like a group that managed to have multiple organizers, not zero organizers. I'm not sure if this ever came up, but the real test of who the organizer(s) are is what happens when one of the rotating leaders drops the ball.
A lot of my meetup interactions are with a fairly small group and unorganized group, so this may be very different in large groups, but we really do need someone to be the organizer since most people don't show up consistently.
The person running the meetup doesn't need to show up consistently, since all they're committing to is to attend that one meetup, and they'll do so enthusiastically since they're specifically setting the agenda to be something they're interested in. It's not a thing you have to do, but a thing you get to do.
In the group I was in, we would often specifically encourage newcomers to volunteer right off the bat, so their 2nd or 3rd meetup would be something led by them. Whether they'd keep attending regularly after that was a crapshoot, but by then the job was done.
I'm not sure if this ever came up, but the real test of who the organizer(s) are is what happens when one of the rotating leaders drops the ball.
(I don't remember if this happened.)
I'm pleased to be so widely referenced! And I've been following these posts and appreciating them, I like the eye you've got for group structures.
Having said that, I'm not going to disagree a bit XD I do agree with Brendan that your case sounds like you've distributed the organizer role, not removed it. This is the strategy both Melting Gold and Overthrow The Organizer Day are pointing at.
For a case report: Around six months ago I switched tactics in Boston Rationality. Previously I'd been trying out lots of formats and activities for the individual meetups, treating myself as a reliable part of the system. Around September of last year, I made a plan to run a month of very easy meetups. (Board games at a pub, and chapter by chapter book discussions in an office building lobby.) I then told people I would be out of town all November, so other people would have to take up the torch. I pitched other meetup ideas and encouraged other people to pitch their meetup ideas. I made a little bit of fanfare when someone ran a meetup and gave them a special colour in the community discord.
Today there's fourteen people who have run a meetup (meaning they're the ones who picked a time and place and announced it on the event channels) in the last year, and by tomorrow there's going to be fifteen. Some do it more commonly than others, but it's now totally normal to have a week where three different organizers are up to something. We've even established that bans are per-person-running-the-meetup; this does mean we're going to have some obnoxious people show up for longer than would be ideal as different meetup runners ban them one by one, but in the other direction I don't feel like this function is resting solely on me anymore.
I call the people who pick a time and place and announce it and who know they can ban people they don't want at their events "meetup organizers." Boston Rationality has lost a little bit of my specific flavour of ambition focus, but we gained so much more from having lots and lots of organizers.
I do agree with Brendan that your case sounds like you've distributed the organizer role, not removed it. This is the strategy both Melting Gold and Overthrow The Organizer Day are pointing at.
In the extreme, "nobody is an organizer" and "everybody is an organizer" are just different descriptions of the same state of affairs.
But the scenarios described in "Melting Gold" and "Overthrow the Organizer Day" differ from the "constant rotation" approach by their lateness and exceptionality respectively. In "Melting Gold", the organizer toils in solitude for quite some time before trying to find a replacement, but by then it's too late because they've constructed a role shaped exactly like themself, and training someone else to fill that exact same role takes 20 hours of work. In "Overthrow the Organizer Day" it's less urgent, but things go back to "normal" (i.e. the one organizer doing everything) once the "Day" is over, and the others are only there as backups for later.
It sounds like you've advanced much further beyond that in the last six months (which is great). At the point where a group has 14 "organizers" I would find the term rather meaningless, since becoming the 15th doesn't have quite the ontological gravity as becoming the 2nd. But maybe that's just personal preference. Here's a concrete test: If someone is new to the group (i.e. they've been to only one or two meetups), is there a frictionless path for them to organize the very next meetup? Or by the time they realize this was an option, will they already have carved out a niche in the group as a "passive consumer"?
Here's a concrete test: If someone is new to the group (i.e. they've been to only one or two meetups), is there a frictionless path for them to organize the very next meetup? Or by the time they realize this was an option, will they already have carved out a niche in the group as a "passive consumer"?
I don't think the path to organizing the very next meetup is frictionless, no. My guess at the fast path would be something like:
- They attend one of the meetups in a public space, and get invited to the next. (The invitation was already open, this doesn't change much.)
- They attend a second meetup, and afterwards get the Attendee role in the discord and possibly invited to a couple of the very slightly filtered events e.g. the ones at people's apartments.
- Towards the end of the month, a bunch of us are chatting about ideas for next month's meetups and what days are open. If they volunteer to run something, cool, they announce it and they're on the schedule for next month. Lets say early next month.
- They run the meetup, and afterwards get the Organizer role in the discord where there's more active talk about coordinating for big events or balancing the mix of meetups.
There's a slower version where someone hangs around attending a bit longer (say, two or three months) before getting proffered organizer opportunities. That can look like me messaging them and saying 'hey, I thought the idea for a discussion topic you mentioned sounded good- want to run something about that on the 14th?' or can look like another organizer saying 'hey you mentioned you're further south than the rest of us- if you know any good venues, want to run the Wednesday board game meetup down near your part of town?' or a few other variations. The general strategy is to gently poke people to be more active.
At the point where a group has 14 "organizers" I would find the term rather meaningless, since becoming the 15th doesn't have quite the ontological gravity as becoming the 2nd.
I take the open source view of things; I want lots of contributors all with the repository on their local machine, so that if something happens to the other maintainers, any of those contributors could in theory fork it and keep the thing going. Or to use another community style as an example, the church I grew up in generally thought that each member of the congregation should, if necessary, be able to rebuild the faith with just themselves and a bible. If I can, I want to make Boston Rationality a community where every single person who has attended for more than a year has run an event in the last year. Fifteen organizers is only a good start!
You say
We've even established that bans are per-person-running-the-meetup; this does mean we're going to have some obnoxious people show up for longer than would be ideal as different meetup runners ban them one by one, but in the other direction I don't feel like this function is resting solely on me anymore.
Whereas I say
a community cannot (long) exist unless this specific thing is being taken care of in a coherent way on behalf of the entire group.
(That is: There can be no disagreement about who is banned. Either someone is banned by the whole group, or they are welcomed by the whole group.)
My model is clearly quite different from yours on this point. Each group must decide for itself, of course, but if I were in your position I would be warning everyone that piecemeal banning is unstable and will inevitably lead to either a dramatic schism or the quiet dissolution of the group, probably a lot sooner than anyone thinks.
The issue isn't the inconvenience of an obviously-obnoxious person getting banned gradually. The problem is when you get polarizing "scissor people" who are persistently banned by some organizers but not all; and/or when organizers each ban each other from their respective events. This may seem unlikely, but I do believe it'll eventually happen, and when it does it'll consume a vastly disproportionate amount of the community's attention to the detriment of its actual mission.
(See e.g. the whole Said/Duncan affair - and this was for something as low-stakes as posting on LessWrong. Now imagine this in an IRL community that lots of people are deeply invested in, and where there is no top-level authority to make a final decision.) [Preemptive apology: I have no personal connection to these people and their names are just words-on-the-screen to me. I don't mean to rehash the object-level dispute; it's just an example.]
In my view, the persistence of polarizing/reciprocal bans is clearly in tension with the kind of "community" or "society" I've been advocating for in this sequence. Something will have to give. Either
- the community as a whole decides who's right and who's wrong, and the situation resolves to either a total ban or a total not-ban;
- the community hard-schisms into two or more separate groups, forcing a large number of people into conflict with each other even though they never wanted to take sides; or
- the community dissolves into a undefined mass of small cliques which now become the focus of all the interesting stuff, while the "public life" of the community withers away even if it still exists on paper.
Realistically, #3 is the most likely outcome, and for many people it will seem perfectly fine, because they don't know what "living in a society" actually looks like. But something of great value will have been lost, even if they don't realize it.
1The problem is when you get polarizing "scissor people" who are persistently banned by some organizers but not all; and/or when organizers each ban each other from their respective events. This may seem unlikely, but I do believe it'll eventually happen, and when it does it'll consume a vastly disproportionate amount of the community's attention to the detriment of its actual mission.
I have watched that exact scenario happen. Having watched it, I prefer Boston Rationality's setup for the general community case, with a cheerful norm of splintering if we ever need to.
My read of your sequence here is you're advocating for a specific community structure (the titular "guild") and I actually really like it! I think guilds are underused in modern American society, and for its functioning the guild needs to have a singular ban list from guild activities.
Two quibbles, then.
First, there are going to be ambiguous guild activities that the ban list may not reach. It's the church picnic organized in the field a quarter mile down the road from the church by members, or the unofficial convention afterparties the night after the con. The guild (in this case the church elders or the convention team) can't actually ban people from those, and trying too hard will either fail (causing a bit of community backlash) or succeed (creating a new ambiguous edge of the guild, where the cycle repeats.)
Second, the hard-schisms can be surprisingly porous! I think that's a pretty ideal situation actually if you can mostly avoid forcing people to join the conflict if they don't have to. One church becomes two, where likely the elders and pastors have strong feelings about the other but the congregation will have a lot of friends across the line. Ideally even the elders and pastors continue to be able to relate well; this can go well if the disagreement is acknowledged as an edge case. If you dig into the backchannel backstories of many a modern convention with a similar other convention in the same area, you'll find a story like this.
My current strategy for Boston Rationality is to head this off by making schisms as friendly and easy as possible. There's a bunch of different announcement tools, there's different styles of meetups. If it ever comes to a time when I think a ban is really important to make and my fellow local organizers think it's important to not make, I want to let that schism happen with as little acrimonious fanfare as possible. As a short circuit, I keep on friendly terms with adjacent groups like Fractal and EA and some of this can be handled by someone e.g. getting banned from the ACX group but not the Fractal group or vice versa.
(This is helped enormously of course by the fact that there isn't a lot of hard value held by the group- friendly schisms get harder if there's real estate involved!)
I want to abolish the word "organizer" from discussions about community.
By this I mean not Tabooing the word - I know perfectly well what "organizer" means. The problem is rather that sociological description can never be inert. Well, I suppose it could come close, if we on this English-language website were discussing some remote rainforest tribe that doesn't speak English or use the internet. But here we are explicitly talking about ourselves and our own community; the subjects of our discussion are also the main audience for these posts. So, the concepts we use "descriptively" will inevitably alter the things being described.
In this case, the concept of a "community organizer" imposes two hidden inferences on our social reality. Continued usage of the concept creates a world where these two assumptions are (or seem to be) true, but it doesn't have to be like this, and we will be better off if it isn't:
(Note for logicians: Strange as it may seem, these two propositions are logically independent, and so each should be discussed separately. In particular, it is not the case that "1 → 2". There is a possible world in which 1 is true but 2 is false, i.e. a world where communities don't exist at all!)
The false supposition that a community must necessarily have an organizer
A perennial complaint is that meetup groups tend to become overly reliant on one person in particular, such that the whole thing will fall apart without them (1, 2, 3). This motivates people in this position to seek out "apprentices" whom they can train up to play the same role in their absence. However (at least in my experience), this proves far more difficult than running the meetups in the first place. One feels overwhelmed by the amount of tacit knowledge that must be conveyed; one struggles with the sense that nobody else really "gets it" and that the trainees are merely playing along. And if by some heroic effort you orchestrate a smooth succession, it's only a matter of time before the same problem comes up again for the next person.
But in fact the problem had its origins long ago, when you first started calling yourself an "organizer" (or worse still, "the organizer"). This has a subtle but pernicious effect. Imagine if we applied this thinking to everyday life: I'm cooking breakfast, because I am a chef. I'm working out, because I am an athlete. I'm going out to dinner with friends, because I am a socialite and a gourmand. The order of implication becomes reversed in our minds - the "because"s should really be "therefore"s, but it feels like "because" from the inside. The reification of the labels thus creates an air of formidability about them, as if you're not allowed to do anything until some august body confers upon you the requisite identity badge.
So too with organizer. The very concept creates the problems which all that heroism will later be called upon to solve, by establishing a Schelling point that this particular person is going to do everything, and nobody else will. (And as the concept's namesake explains at length in The Strategy of Conflict, the initial Schelling point may prove very difficult to dislodge, despite what the participants may later say.) This will only serve to convince the organizer even more of their own indispensability, and any onlookers of the unenviable burden that the role represents.
But again, it doesn't have to be like this. One simple alternative is for the group to continually rotate the responsibility of running each meetup by selecting a different person at the previous meetup. Importantly, this responsibility also includes leading the discussion about who will be in charge of the next meetup. Once you've had your turn, you can sit back and relax for a while until you want to go again. Thus, there is no one person without whom the group will stop doing its thing; there is no need for anyone to be persistently lurking in the background "overseeing" the whole process like a poorly-functioning Rube Goldberg machine.
I have been in a couple of groups like this, one of which was the philosophy reading group I started (mentioned earlier). This group's meetings quickly settled into a rhythm. At the start of each meeting, the discussion leader would first invite suggestions for topics people want to discuss at the next meeting, and someone (normatively, whoever hadn't done this in a while) would volunteer to lead their topic of interest. Then the current leader would launch into a discussion on the main topic, and at the end would hand off the group's giant novelty hourglass (used for allocating speaking time) to the next leader. It would now be that person's responsibility to research their topic, email out assigned readings, and announce the date and time for the next meeting. And then the cycle would repeat.
This continued (with a few modifications) for almost 3 years. During that time, I took a several-months-long break from the group, but returned to find it still going strong. If you had asked me who "the organizer" of that group was, I would have struggled to answer.
The false supposition that a community can possibly have an organizer
This is a bit more speculative, but hear me out.
In all the talk about how meetup organizers should share their responsibilities and train up others on how to do what they do, there is one particular function served by organizers which is almost never mentioned. And yet, I would argue, this particular function is the single most important aspect of community organizing, perhaps even the only essential one. Everything else can be done in an ad hoc "do-ocratic" manner, but a community cannot (long) exist unless this specific thing is being taken care of in a coherent way on behalf of the entire group.
Can you guess what that thing is?
Answer: The function of banning people from the group.
The way this is handled will loom large over the organization's culture and color every interaction within it, and will thus determine everything else about the group's character. If it doesn't even make sense to speak of "banning" someone because all interactions are fundamentally opt-in on the part of all participants, then that means the group is a clique. If banning is the prerogative of a single person, then the group is a cult, or at least attempting to be one. Only in a guild can this responsibility be distributed amongst a large number of people.
But, if we're being honest, most "organizers" don't have what it takes to run a cult. It is only an exceptionally rare type of person that can inspire personal loyalty from a whole group of people; and whatever specific qualities such persons may possess, they are qualities not at all correlated with the practical skill of running meetups.
In practice, if the group persists in having an organizer (in this sense), the most likely result is not a cult, but rather a hollow shell that is too casual and superficial to be any type of community at all (and thus is not represented on the classificatory diagram). In a group like this, my contribution is neither needed nor wanted; I don't care about the group because it doesn't care about me.
("Liberty engenders particular hatreds, but despotism is responsible for general indifference." - Democracy in America, vol. 2 pt. 2 ch. 4.)
Insofar as such "superficial groups" can help me pass the time when I'm bored on a weekday night and go on meetup-dot-com looking for something to do, I have no problem with them per se. Not every group needs my personal devotion; sometimes it's okay to just take it easy and let someone else do all the work. But I don't want this to be the only game in town, such that people call it "community" because they know nothing else. Such groups will never enable the kind of deep connections that we need in great numbers in order to truly live in a society.