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aausch comments on Can Humanism Match Religion's Output? - Less Wrong
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How about trying to use Croquet (or some other 3D collaborative environment, with voice chat)?
I have seen people form strong attachments of responsibility to groups while playing World of Warcraft. A friend of mine will frequently beg off social engagements because of scheduled in-game events to which he needs to contribute. Something about the 3-D avatars seems to do the job.
In fact, I'd start even simpler. We need profiles. I'm not saying we turn LessWrong into Facebook, but our brains are wired to track humans, and specifically to respond to faces. I think if we simply had a photo of each LessWrong member appearing next to their submissions (as Emile has also suggested), it would help to excite those faculties. In addition, if each member had a place to write about themselves for a line or two, or link to a personal website, that might help.
Or start a LessWrong group on Facebook.
done -- comment here if you'd like to be an admin.
Faces and voices are also not needed. I've played browser based games such as pardus and felt committed, if only briefly before realising real life is more important.
What I need is to be mentally committed to a project. Someone says we need to do X and asks how do we go about doing X. Discussion ensues. If the discussion ends up we need to raise Z amount of money or Y people to be on at a certain time I am likely to contribute to that or try and be that person.
Contributing to an anonymous pot won't get people committed as a specific project.
A bit like what pjeby talks about with envisaging actions, push and all that.
According to studies done by Yale's Brian Scassellati, embodiment is necessary for real social interaction. People respond differently to someone in the room than they do to someone on a screen, even if it's the same person.
Second Life?
Ease of entry and exit is really important. I want to be able to enter the world and enter a discussion asap, but I don't want to feel compelled to stay for long periods of time.
So I think a browser based program would be best, rather than Second Life.
But I think having a place such as Second Life would be good addition compared to what we have now with LW. Having a a place where people like ourselves can discuss things in practically real time, would, I think, be useful in helping to create this community of Rationalists.
Mechanisms that make it feel like we really are living together, such as a detailed virtual world, and even virtual houses, could help in making the community and keeping people participating in it. And of course, the added benefit of this is that we don't need to be physically close to each other but we could get the benefits as if we were (given a detailed enough environment).
That's interesting - a previous community I was involved in also considered using Croquet for rich interaction, but at the time the technology barriers were high (they probably still are, no ? I haven't checked it out recently).
What we did (well, they did mostly - I was in the wrong timezone and couldn't take part most of the time) - was simultaneous voice chat and collaborative document editing (with an application that allowed to work at several on a text file with different colors for each user).
A colleague of mind created this collaborative editing environment, if you think something like that would be useful:
http://www.lshift.net/blog/2009/03/02/evserver-part3-simplified-etherpad-clone