Description of the First PSD Event

The short version is: speed-dating works for poly folks. The first Poly Speed Dating event was held at Spud's Pizza in Berkeley. Fifty folks attended, with a nearly dead split between men and women. There were five groups, all mixed-gender, three seeking women, and two seeking men. The age range was 22 to 56 years old, with men being generally a few years older than women. Men were primarily looking for women, with a few notable exceptions, and women were looking for all sorts of things, with the dominant fraction looking for any gender. Most folks were open to meeting groups. Many folks commented on how few people they knew there, indicating that the event pulled people from many different poly and non-monogamous communities.

People arrived a little after 6pm, ate some food and drank some beer, and started the dating at around 7, after an inspiring introduction from Pepper. We (the organizers) had brought a computer and printer, and so were able to take late registrations, and run the (newly written, never-been-fully-tested) matching algorithm on the site. This program figures out who could theoretically date whom, and then schedules the series of dates for everyone to get as many people talking to as many potential matches as possible. We then printed the individualized dating schedules that told folks what tables to go to when. The dates were approximately 4 minutes long. It was noisy as 40 or 50 folks all started talking at once! The room was small, so the groups tended to sit in each others laps, but they seemed happy enough doing that. People had a varying number of dates, and so the social area tended to be populated with people hanging out and waiting for their next scheduled date. Many people commented on the presence of many people that they found quite attractive, which is always a good sign.

The event itself ended up being 11 rounds of speed dating instead of the hoped-for 14, due to our rerunning all the matching and printing out new date schedules to take care of the large number of unexpected no-shows. (In future events this snafu will be avoided by closing registration and kicking out all folks not present before running the match program.) The matching algorithm generally worked, although handling the matching of groups to individuals and other groups unfortunately had a few glitches. Overall, most people got nearly as many dates as they could theoretically get. It is possible an improved algorithm could schedule fewer conflicts, but we believe the increment would be minor. We do hope to update the algorithm to take into account strong and weak preferences (e.g., primarily looking for men, but am open to women).

At the end of the night we had hoped to do the matching right then. While we were doing this, participants milled around, drank beer, chatted, and filled out feedback forms. Unfortunately we were unable to do the matching in real-time and thus had to send everyone home empty handed (but happy) and then email the results late that night.

After the dust had settled, men had an average of 1 or 2 mutual matches, and women had an average of 2 or 3 matches. 70% of attendants had at least one mutual match. Some folks indicated interest in everyone on their list, some folks none, some folks only one or two. Some people had eleven dates, some as few as two or three. Both the feedback forms and personal conversations indicated that even those who had very few dates seemed happy enough, and several got mutual matches. Lots of participants felt like they met people (not necessarily dating people) that they looked forward to seeing again.

Generally speaking, people had a really good time. The evening was filled with laughter and excitement; it seemed people were really into the strange, yet promising, experience of speed dating. The feedback at the end was overwhelmingly positive, and emails coming in during the days after suggested that both people were saying great things about the event, and had even hooked up with folks they met! At the end of the night we immediately wanted to run the event again as it was a blast to see it in action. It was all an organizer could hope for.

Future events will hopefully be for a slightly longer time starting a bit later-ideally going from 6:45 to 10pm, with doors closing at 7:20 and the official dating starting at a bit before 8. With some software help, the final matching can be done more quickly and thus folks can get their dates as they walk out the door. The matching algorithm had a few bugs, but they have already been fixed in preparation for the next event. We are considering whether to have an option for friendship dates-dates between people who mutually don't match, to fill some of the empty slots. While it is possible that matching can be done better, generally speaking the overall system seems to have a good chance of matching folks of similar interest and getting them to talk to one another.