Dale McGowan writes:
And it needs to go well beyond one greeter. EVERY MEMBER of EVERY GROUP should make it a point to chat up new folks—and each other, for that matter. And not just about the latest debunky book. Ask where he’s from, what she does for a living, whether he follows the Mets or the Yankees. You know, mammal talk.
In this spirit, I propose the creation of a fully off-topic discussion thread.
Here is our monthly place to discuss topics entirely unrelated to Less Wrong that (of course) have not appeared in recent posts.
ETA: There are two behaviors I would love to see associated with this thread. First of all, discussions often drift off-topic in the middle of a thread. In these cases "let's take this to the off-topic thread" would be an excellent response. Secondly, given who's doing the discussing, I could easily see, say, a discussion about recent developments in some webcomic blossoming into a LW-worthy insight, in which case someone could spawn a new thread.
How is the Summer of Code application pool looking for Opencog? I'm mentoring for Battle For Wesnoth, and while we've gotten a pretty bad ratio of serious to unserious applications, we're more than making up for it in volume and we'll easily have an excellent student per every mentor.
I love that game--and in particular, I love the variety of new units that you can discover by leveling up ones you already know about.