I agree immensely with this. I recently attended DebConf 15, (the conference for Debian), and in an introductory session some long-time attendees were asked to express why they attended the conference. What they said were things like “
This is where all my friends are.” and I even heard someone say “
Debian is my family.”. This is emphatically
not why I go to
any conferences. I go to conferences in order to advance the state of the field by listening to talks and getting to personally talk to people also working to advance the field, in this case the Debian GNU/Linux operating system distribution.
I did get a lot of that done, but this spirit of chummy familiarity was pervasive. Every problem of getting people to cooperate and collaborate more was approached as a problem of not enough socializing. But I don’t want to socialize with lots of random people. I want to make Debian more awesome, not shoot the breeze with random people with wine and cheese (yes, DebConf has a Wine and Cheese event in addition to the large social outing). Beyond having a title and summary for talks (and some rather narrowly scoped BoF sessions), there were no concerted efforts to get people in the same field of interest to get to speaking about common topics and solving common problems. I voiced a complaint to someone about this, that in order to find anyone who was interested in the topics I wanted to discuss I would have had to basically randomly wander around and ask every person I met about what they did, which would have taken a lot of time and energy. But the person I talked to saw it as a good thing to essentially force me to socialize with people even though pure socializing was not my goal.
Optimizing groups to be more social to the detriment of all else is not what you want to do if your group has any other overriding reason to exist beyond being a pure social club, since you exclude people who would rather work towards the group’s proclaimed goal than being social and chatting with friends.
I did get a lot of that done, but this spirit of chummy familiarity was pervasive. Every problem of getting people to cooperate and collaborate more was approached as a problem of not enough socializing. But I don’t want to socialize with lots of random people. I want to make Debian more awesome, not shoot the breeze with random people with wine and cheese (yes, DebConf has a Wine and Cheese event in addition to the large social outing). Beyond having a title and summary for talks (and some rather narrowly scoped BoF sessions), there were no concerted efforts to get people in the same field of interest to get to speaking about common topics and solving common problems. I voiced a complaint to someone about this, that in order to find anyone who was interested in the topics I wanted to discuss I would have had to basically randomly wander around and ask every person I met about what they did, which would have taken a lot of time and energy. But the person I talked to saw it as a good thing to essentially force me to socialize with people even though pure socializing was not my goal.
Optimizing groups to be more social to the detriment of all else is not what you want to do if your group has any other overriding reason to exist beyond being a pure social club, since you exclude people who would rather work towards the group’s proclaimed goal than being social and chatting with friends.