[Chad]

Thank you everyone for attending our 4th Annual MacInsiders Social night at Kelseys! We had a great turnout and some great fun.

Post your photos and any feedback you have as replies to this thread, or tweet them with hashtag #misocial

Yours truly,
The MacInsiders Team

[drpatel]

thanks for a fun night MI crew!!

[Entropy]

Hey I just met you

...But I probably won't remember anyone who's not a Chat regular.

[Yogurt]

I don't attend these things because I am a turtle.

[rabrab]

hehe im in the last picture! i had an awesome time!

[Entropy]

It's been a few days now, so I can probably offer some more detailed comments on the Social.

Overall, I felt it was better than last year's, but there's still a lot of room for improvement. It's worth mentioning that a lot has changed since the first one I went to in '10 at Stonewalls, so that probably contributed to how differently I perceived it. Since then, I've gone from a relative stranger to the MI community to being an established member and knowing a decent chunk of the people attending the social. So, that probably affected the amount of effort I took to meet new people and stuff.

Some pros and cons:

+ Having activities was a good idea. I don't recall anything like that happening last year and I'm sure they helped people interact.

- That being said, the “Speed Meeting” event itself seemed like a bit of a flop. It started off strong since at that point everyone was still organized but from what I observed it started to fizzle out after the first few rounds. The inherent problem with things like this is that two minutes is only enough time to get to answer those questions and no more. The point of these events is to make friends and generally speaking no one is comfortable enough after two minutes of asking predetermined questions to bother exchanging contact info. It's a problem that Welcome Week shares; where you meet like a million people, learn their names, faculties, and residences and then forget about them ten minutes later. The difference is that Welcome Week offers a lot more people, so even if you forget 95% of everyone you meet you still end off with at least a couple of lasting friends. Unfortunately, I didn't participate in (or even observe) the spaghetti thing so maybe someone who did can offer some more insight. I still think that the '10 Social did activities and icebreakers best, but I don't know if it's because of the mindset I had at the time or if they were just better-organized.

- Related to the above: the same thing happened as last year, where people bunched up into their own groups (Chat regulars, girls, frosh, etc) and didn't stray from them. It makes sense that people hang out with those they're comfortable with, but it makes meeting people a little difficult. It's like what the Asians on campus all do, except you (well, we) all do it too.

+ The different giveaway structure was good. While previously there was a focus on quantity instead of quality of prizes, this year it was the other way around. I'm of the opinion that a mix of both is optimal, with some non-random ways to win as well. Being a MacInsiders event maybe there should have been something related to the forums? Maybe a community vote for the most helpful active user or something to encourage forum activity; though some measures would have to be put in place to prevent alt/throwaway accounts from inflating the results. Just an idea I had that perhaps someone can keep in mind.

- It might seem a little silly and inconsequential, but I think having username/real name nametags for everyone instead of just the mods would have gone a long way. The advantage that a MacInsiders social is supposed to have over any other social/Welcome Week event is that you should have a bit of an idea of who everyone is-- it may have just been me, but one of the things I looked forward to most every year was being able to attach a face to a username ("Hey, you're that troll!"). That happened a bit this year too, but it wasn't encouraged as much as it was previously. Instead of having a bit of a head start with people, you were meeting them from scratch, just like you (if you’re frosh) were doing all of the week before.

- That one guy. You know who I'm talking about.

- I don't think much can be done about this, but the food/drink ordering process was a mess. I can't think of a way to improve this though.

- The pre-meeting MUSC meetup was less than successful. I think that having only one wave of people leave for Kelsey's as opposed to two or three cut off a lot of potential attendees. While a small group of us stayed back to gather up latecomers, we weren't the most official-looking and I can imagine a lot of first-years opposed to the idea of meeting up with strangers they met online for fear of how awkward they'd seem if they were wrong. Meeting at Compass, which is already busy as opposed to the fireplace might have caused a bit of unnecessary confusion as well.

+ Karaoke was fun. Props to all the soloists. (y)

- Call Me Maybe wasn't in the system.

Looking over this list it seems like I have a lot of criticisms but I just find it easier to comment on things that need improvement than to applaud the things that went well. It was a good time overall and it was nice to see a bunch of familiar faces as well as new ones.

Also, everyone should visit Chat and say hey to us.

Feel free to argue with me and I'll be glad to prove you wrong discuss this with you further. =p

[Chad]

Thanks for the feedback Stephen! We will definitely take everything you brought up into consideration for our next event.

Speed Meeting definitely did seem to fizzle out after a few rounds, though I'm not sure it could be attributed to the 2 minute timer (though I agree, possibly more time could help people connect on a deeper level, but it also means the activity takes much longer. We did 20 minute session 2 minute rotation, so you met 10 people. Doubling the time to 4 minutes means you'd meet 5 people. Maybe users would prefer to meet more people but with less time, vs. more time but only meet 5 new people. It's hard to tell.). I think the activity fizzled mainly because the people who were playing the speed meeting wanted to continue chatting with their new found friends and didn't want to leave the table, and since sessions were 20 minutes long, by the time we got to the 3rd group, 40 minutes had passed and they had become settled at other tables and didn't want to participate and move since they were comfortable where they were?

Possible idea for next time would be to have more speed meeting tables to expand the activity at the beginning, and make it so everyone gets to participate at the beginning, while NOT making it mandatory like other years, since some still prefer not to participate which we learned from past years with Stonewalls and Boston Pizza meetups.

We were quite surprised this year that our new activity Tower Of Power was very popular. We had dozens of groups trying to build towers, some staying at that activity station for over an hour attempting to build. So we'll definitely consider bringing back a similar activity next big meetup.

People bunching up into their familiar 'groups', will always happen no matter how hard we try to split people up, it's human nature to stay close to those you feel comfortable around. This is the reasoning behind this year's 'coloured stickers' where everyone that came in was given a different colour so that when they came in a group, essentially you were split up into different colours and then in the speed meeting activities, ended up mingling with those of the same sticker colour as you, thus meeting new people and splitting up the 'groups'. I can't think of any other way to do it, and ultimately we don't want to force people into anything that is too awkward for them, and still want them to enjoy hanging out with their known friends.

Great idea about the prize for forum participation. I think we'll try and incorporate the site and reward forum power users who have been very active and helpful throughout the year to give them prizes, while still having random door prizes.

Usernames on nametags is definitely something we forgot to do this year and will do next time, as it helps people point out others that they have become familiar with by their username in the forum. We will be sure to ask that they write usernames on the nametags rather than just their first name. We've done this in the past and it worked well.

Having two MUSC groups coming down is a great idea, and will be looked at for future meetups. Unfortunately it does require extra volunteers to pull off properly, and we need staff at the venue to setup prior so we didn't have any extra staff available this year for two MUSC meeting spot runs. But definitely worth a look at next time!

Glad you enjoyed Karaoke!

Any other criticisms or feedback please let us know. We love hearing new ideas and ways we can improve the meetup experience!

[RyanC]

I didn't hear many of the announcements, and it was loud overall. I liked the tower building thingy.