I came across the
Noonhat site the other day, which immediately seemed like a good idea to me:
The main goal of Noonhat is to connect us with people outside of our normal social, work, and hobby circles. It's easy nowadays to filter down to match on particular interests. I want to help all of us open up a bit and have good conversations with a wide variety of people. Occasionally, even people we may disagree with!
I tried to sign up in New Haven, but since the site only recently launched outside of Seattle, I got put on the waiting list there. However, I knew I'd be in Manhattan tonight for a sort of dinner discussion with
Andy Oram and Karl Fogel, so I decided to put in for a NYC Noonhat lunch today.
This morning I got an email telling me I got paired up with Noam, who works in midtown Manhattan. We met and went for Vietnamese. He's working in corporate environmental affairs and has an activist background, so it turned out we had a lot to talk about. We got into stuff about the environment, about social networks, information freedom, free culture, and even a bit about free software / community driven development.
In a day where I'd be otherwise just getting a quick bite to eat while traveling anyway, it was nice to have some conversation, especially with someone who isn't necessarily interested in the same exact things as I am.
I'd definitely try Noonhat again, and would probably give Noam a call to get lunch again. He had some interesting thoughts on distribution models for scientific works that I probably would want to discuss a bit more.
So if you've got nothing to do for lunch, consider trying this out in your town. It's definitely fun, and a refreshing approach to getting people together in a world that seems to be a little too cliquey for own own good.
