Proximity chat events about online socializing and linguistics
Looking to try out proximity chat with some fellow humans? Here's a place to do that!

I wrote an article about the results of my previous virtual hallway/pub night experiments https://www.wired.com/story/zoom-parties-proximity-chat/ so let's do some more event! Feel free to join if you're curious about using Gather for your upcoming parties, classes, conferences, etc and want to try it out with a group of people.

This week, I'm doing two events, each capped at 25 people because that's the size of gather.town's free plan.

MAKING BETTER ONLINE SOCIAL INTERACTIONS - Friday, Dec 4, 7pm North American Eastern Time
Come with your ideas and thoughts and experiments (and complaints, tbh) about making social interactions less awkward than a wall of Zoom faces! Relevant reading (not obligatory, let me know if there are any other readings I could be pointing people to, by you or others!) :
https://www.wired.com/story/zoom-parties-proximity-chat/
https://dev.to/lazerwalker/using-game-design-to-make-virtual-events-more-social-24o
https://onezero.medium.com/party-in-a-shared-google-doc-d576c565706e?gi=sd
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8aZUoKIUFg

LINGTHUSIAST TOWN - Sunday, Dec 6, 3pm North American Eastern Time
Linguists at any level and people who are excited to talk about linguistics!

Want to attend both events? Just fill out the form twice! (This makes it easier for me to sort people on the back end.) If one event fills up, I may in that case shuffle you to only the less full event.

Assume that each "town" will be active for about an hour, maybe longer if people get going with conversations and having fun.

Why do I ask for self-description and link?
Well, conferences have a certain amount of social context, but the internet is...unlike that, so it seemed unwise to just sort of chatroulette myself through a webform. If I don't already recognize your name from social media, it's useful to have an additional source of context. If I know you irl, you are also totally welcome to join, feel free to refresh my memory if you've developed any further interests I might not know about or remember (I generally scan the interests column separately from the names column).

I will bcc-email a gather.town link by group to the email address you put below, shortly before the event. Gather town lets you set your own username - feel free to join under a name you also use offline or a persistent internet pseudonym, whichever you're comfortable with.

I have no idea what kind of response to expect, so I'll plan to take people by order of signup (eliminating obvious spam) and close the form if both events fill up.
Sign in to Google to save your progress. Learn more
Name *
What country are you in? *
Email address *
I will send you a link to the relevant gather.town an hour or so before the event
Which event do you want to join? *
Website or most relevant social media link *
Short self-description *
(tweet-length ish is fine!)
A few topics that you are interested in chatting about and think other attendees might be interested in too! *
(Optional) A link that you think other people at this event might enjoy?
Submit
Clear form
Never submit passwords through Google Forms.
This content is neither created nor endorsed by Google. Report Abuse - Terms of Service - Privacy Policy