# Cooperative conversational threading

([Cross-posted](http://reasonableapproximation.net/2015/04/14/cooperative-conversational-threading.html) from my blog.)

Sometimes at LW meetups, I'll want to raise a topic for discussion. But we're currently already talking about something, so I'll wait for a lull in the current conversation. But it feels like the duration of lull needed before I can bring up something totally unrelated, is longer than the duration of lull before someone else will bring up something marginally related. And so we can go for a long time, with the topic frequently changing incidentally, but without me ever having a chance to change it deliberately.

Which is fine. I shouldn't expect people to want to talk about something just because I want to talk about it, and it's not as if I find the actual conversation boring. But it's not necessarily optimal. People might in fact want to talk about the same thing as me, and following the path of least resistance in a conversation is unlikely to result in the best possible conversation.

At the last meetup I had two topics that I wanted to raise, and realized that I had no way of raising them, which was a third topic worth raising. So when an interruption occured in the middle of someone's thought - a new person arrived, and we did the "hi, welcome, join us" thing - I jumped in. "Before you start again, I have three things I'd like to talk about at some point, but not now. Carry on." Then he started again, and when that topic was reasonably well-trodden, he prompted me to transition.

Then someone else said that he also had two things he wanted to talk about, and could I just list my topics and then he'd list his? (It turns out that no I couldn't. You can't dangle an interesting train of thought in front of the London LW group and expect them not to follow it. But we did manage to initially discuss them only briefly.)

This worked pretty well. Someone more conversationally assertive than me might have been able to take advantage of a less solid interruption than the one I used. Someone less assertive might not have been able to use that one.

What else could we do to solve this problem?

Someone suggested a hand signal: if you think of something that you'd like to raise for discussion later, make the signal. I don't think this is ideal, because it's not continuous. You make it once, and then it would be easy for people to forget, or just to not notice.

I think what I'm going to do is bring some poker chips to the next meetup. I'll put a bunch in the middle, and if you have a topic that you want to raise at some future point, you take one and put it in front of you. Then if a topic seems to be dying out, someone can say "&lt;person&gt;, what did you want to talk about?"

I guess this still needs at least one person assertive enough to do that. I imagine it would be difficult for me. But the person who wants to raise the topic doesn't need to be assertive, they just need to grab a poker chip. It's a fairly obvious gesture, so probably people will notice, and it's easy to just look and see for a reminder of whether anyone wants to raise anything. (Assuming the table isn't too messy, which might be a problem.)

I don't know how well this will work, but it seems worth experimenting.

(I'll also take a moment to advocate another conversation-signal that we adopted, via CFAR. If someone says something and you want to tell people that you agree with them, instead of saying that out loud, you can just raise your hands a little and wiggle your fingers. Reduces interruptions, gives positive feedback to the speaker, and it's kind of fun.)