In this case, the ascription that I fear is anathema to any enthusiasm that I could muster for helping friend, and for very straightforward, logical reasons. Nothing moves a household’s worth of goods more slowly than a crowd of people.

I have a loose affiliations with two dining clubs here in town. One of they does three things I find slightly notable. A) pricy venue, B) they have very limited seats, and C) they set aside an allotment for new faces (along with a process). A & B create status and scarcity effect (hence the need for C). As usual they also have a long tail.

I wonder if there is handbook out there on how to run a small dinning club.

I’m always interested in how these complicated human relationships get simplified in online systems, and how systems get it wrong.

I’ve seen a breakdown of groups (due to Bob Parnes in his PhD thesis) that distinguishes between open and closed, permanent vs. limited duration, and “on topic” vs “open forum”.

A particular interest of mine is in groups that grow in number overall but that don’t have any more people at their regular meetings than the space will fill. A relatively open lunch group I run has 400 or so people on a mailing list but about 25 regular lunch attendees; it would not be sustainable if everyone showed up for lunch every time, because where would the extra spaces be for the new people?

Much more to type in, but it’s not all organized enough to want to write it down.