I Wish I could Find Better Groups

Here I'll talk about my quest to find good community, and the disappointments that I find instead. Of course, nothing starts out perfect, so I'm totally willing to help improve many of these if I can.

* U of C Freethinkers (it's disbanded) (I wrote a bit about it here)
* YYC Connects
* Secular Humanists of Alberta
* Progressive Minded Albertans
* We Should Know Each Other
* Calgary Leadership, Human Venture
* Calgary Secular Church
* the local Community Center

I'm also working on ideas for what an ideal community should be like.  See my page about What a Community Should Do.

## YYC Connects

The website had some news articles (last updated in late 2016).

The tagline is "Uniting Calgarians for social impact".

But how are we supposed to connect?  Comment on things?  But the blogger is the only one who gets to set the topic, essentially.  Set up to just be interacting with the website owner.  Not with other Calgarians who don't own the website.  I mean, it's possible to interact with others in the comments...but that would (among other things) first require someone has something to say about the things the website owner chooses to post.  So while it's possible to interact with others, this is not what the website is set up to most easily do.

Though note that the Progressive Minded Albertans facebook page allows any of us to post.  Yet it still doesn't result in much connection.  Even though there are often enough comments exchanged between many people.  Maybe it's too focused on news, outside world, and not enough focused on what we want, our internal agency.  Something like that.

Also, I had met and spoken to one of the people from YYC connects.  She was basically interviewing me, because I wanted to help and volunteer.  It sounded like I would be allowed to do whatever I wanted.  Sounded great...

But it never happened.  After the meeting, I still had to submit an application form.  I did that, but she was on vacation now for a month so I had to wait.  So I waited.  And waited more than the month (they might have been busy with flood relief, or fire relief, whatever happened that year in the spring).  I sent one or two more followup emails, asking if she had received and seen my application.  I never go any response, so I gave up.  The website stopped posting news within the next half year, so who knows what happened.

So anyways, I didn't get a chance to help.

## Secular Humanists of Alberta

Another group (similar to U of C freethinkers) where people get together to talk about news in the external world.  Not usually local news, mostly about far away news impacting none of our lives.  Not focussed on our own goals or agency.  Not focussed on getting to know each other or connecting.

## Progressive Minded Albertans

facebook page allows any of us to post.  Yet it still doesn't result in much connection.  Even though there are often enough comments exchanged between many people.  Maybe it's too focussed on news, outside world, and not enough focussed on what we want, our internal agency.  Something like that.

## A lecture in the U of C Feminist group space, 2016

That feminist club workshop/meeting I went to, fall of 2016 i think.

Was called something like "Social media activism in the age of Trump", I think.

I expected to start connecting with people so that we could do activism together on social media.  Especially at this crucial moment in history when the USA president is going to be elected soon.

Instead, seemed to just be one person giving a lecture.  About social media activism other people had done.  It was like a history lesson?  For some reason?  Not an activist plan?

It definitely wasn't the beginning of a collaboration.

At one point the person was talking about women tweeting some USA political man , I forget why but it kind of made sense due to his stance on something important to women, all these women were tweeting him when they had their period, telling him about that.  Great example of online activism to look at.   BUT, you'll never guess what our lecturer said next.  Because what she said next made no sense whatsoever and demonstrates she had some very bizarre and out of touch thinking.  She remarked that this was ironic or unusual because..."we" usually think of technology (like twitter) as being unnassociated with biology and life...or something.  Seriously.  She thought that was somehow interesting, novel, and ironic, and should be remarked upon.  She didn't seem to actually know what most people think about communication technology:  you can use it to communicate any topic you like, and people talk about biology and health topics all the time, and that is normal and unremarkable.

At some point we found out she had a book!  That we could buy!  And I thought "oh, that's all this is about, she's doing this whole talk just so she can advertise her book".

Near the end, one of the women at the meeting said something about how we need to do problem solving, or something.  And the lecturer reacted in a way that seemed to indicate that she thought this was a great idea...but like she was surprised and had never thought of that idea before.  For some reason she thought it would be useful to give us this history lecture, and she hadn't thought that maybe we want to actually do activism and problem solving to work on these political issues.

At the end, there was a survey handout, to evaluate the event we had just been through.  But we had no privacy, and they were all handed in right in front of her.  I was too embarrassed to give the criticism I wanted to, so I left most of it blank.

## Local Community Center

There's, like, yoga, and some stuff for kids. It clearly just has a few services to provide people, like a little market (and services/activities that don't interest me, at that). It is not an actual community as best I can tell.

Compare the website of the local community center to the website of the nearby larger regressive church.

## Progress Alberta

I went to an event of theirs, once again hoping for connection. But once again it just turned out to be lectures!

I hoped the last lecture would be better, because it was kind of branded as a "discussion group", And the one I chose was related to political organizing! I thought we would connect and go on to do political organizing together. Nope, more lecture. And the few people among us, the audience, who commented ("participated in discussion" by interrupting throughout the lecture) were the types who talk forever with seemingly no point, they just have to vent I guess, oblivious to their social selfishness.

Tacked on at the end was (I think) a call to "network" with each other, in a completely unstructured way when people were done all the talks and people were leaving. I had to leave, it was late at night, freezing cold. And that kind of situation is the worst for even attempting to "network". And I missed most of that time anyways, along with whatever final conclusions there were as the results of the "discussion groups" were presented to everyone, because my side group went way over time due to the conflict between trying to get the lecture done in time (why not just give me a web page that has all the info for me to read? Why was I there?), and trying to listen to the audience members who clearly had tons to vent about. And what was the point of them voicing their opinions? We weren't going to be working together, or see each other ever again. We should have formed an online group and handled people's barely contained opinions there, where there would be time to really get into them, and more of a reason to do so.

We did get emailed a feedback survey. I told them my frustrations. They actually had a question that read "Are there ways we could have made it easier for you to meet and network at the event?". I can't seriously believe they tried any "ways" to make it easy. So it's they are asking if there is any way that networking can be facilitated at all. Which there is: structured gathering of info and matching and alignment processing. Or at least small table groups of 4 - 8 people, so that I don't have to randomly walk up to strangers and try to turn it into a good use of our time. A meetup event with Civic Tech YYC did this small table group thing, where we brainstormed stuff in a group, and at one point we were all directed to shuffle which group we were with. Pretty great. It was at least a promising start.