A Physical Social Network℠

​“I go to so many events, I don’t need to hear about any more of them.”

​I hear this so often that I’ve decided to give it a name: event fatigue.

​There’s no shortage of events in NYC — just take a look at Luma, Eventbrite, MeetUp and Posh. People are craving social connection, and many have realized that to find it, you have to go offline.

​But in a world of platforms with hundreds of events each week, people are left overwhelmed by the volume and unsatisfied by the outcomes. It isn’t enough to just go offline and attend events because what people are looking for is not another B2B SaaS meetup or a quick LinkedIn scan. What they are looking for is authentic human connection.

​One of the best kept secrets of community building is that it is not about how many people are in the community, but about how connected the community members feel to each other. So if you are hopping from event to event with different people at each one, it will be hard to find what you are looking for.

For the last decade, we (as a society) have outsourced our search for community to events platforms. But just as in one-on-one human relationships, where you need to spend quality time with loved ones to maintain and strengthen your relationship, the same is true about community. It is not a question of meeting new people every day, but of deepening your existing community ties.

​That’s why Tavern Community is important.

​It’s not an events platform, but you can host events on the platform.

​It’s not a coworking space, although members have access to coworking spaces.

​And it’s not an events company, even though we host a lot of events.

​At its core what we are building is a community, a place where members get to know each other and develop relationships over time.

​Within that community we have sub-communities. I tend to think of this in terms of a university. At any university, you have a range of hundreds of clubs with people as different as can be: the engineering club and the poetry journal, and also the dance club and the basketball club. All of these clubs belong to a meta-structure, and it’s their belonging to a university that enables and gives meaning to their existence. And the existence of clubs gives the university its culture, texture, and feel. But critically, there is a shared identity, a shared framework, a shared social infrastructure.

​So if you are feeling a bit tired of going to events, it might be because you are looking for something deeper than surface level interactions: you might just be looking for a community.