Learning + Community

The Idea Exchange Dinners are a place for making new friends and sharing ideas. Creating a community where a bunch of interesting and diverse people can learn from one another is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, but I don’t like Meetups and mixers with tons of people, and am often overwhelmed by conferences. I think I’ve finally figured out a good model for this that works for me — and you’re invited.

The Idea Exchange Dinners are:

  • A small group meal, at my apartment, with around 6-8 (interested and interesting!) people
  • A casual get together with a focus on sharing interesting and uncommon ideas we’ve each come across that might be useful to others
  • An experiment in emergent learning environments, a collaborative show and tell discussion…and maybe more!

I envision each person sharing something that’s not entirely commonplace, yet simple to understand, and has intriguing applications — some examples I really like include “field configuring event”, “the technium”, “multimodality”, “spimes”, and “hypergames”. Could be a specific application of a generally powerful idea (e.g. some cool new application of evolutionary biology or complexity theory), an academic concept that hasn’t yet entered the popular lexicon, or some other concept you feel lucky to have found. The idea is to present these ideas in a concise and accessible way, and then talk together about why they’re interesting and important. My hope is that we’ll all learn at least a couple new things that we otherwise might never have encountered.

I would love to have you over if this sounds like your cup of tea. I host these occasionally (no fixed schedule) they take place at my apartment in Prospect Heights, where Jinjin and I have space for around eight people at a time — fairly intimate both by design and by necessity.

I’ll take care of food and drinks, and will ask for a small contribution to cover costs and confirm your spot. All you have to bring with you is an interesting idea to add to our communal cognitive toolkit.

If you’d like to read a bit about what I’ve learned from hosting these dinners so far, check out this post on Medium!

If you’re interested in participating, please send me a note and I’ll let you know when I add more to the calendar!