I'm interested in how we can design online communities to better reinforce and facilitate the human experience which digital connectedness often makes us miss out on.

An obvious answer is to encourage more real world, face to face interaction. But there's many questions still on how best to do this.

I wonder specifically, what are the aspects of physical meetups that we enjoy and that keep us coming back.

How can we use technology to remove some of the work in facilitating these, and make us less lonely.

I reckon the HN community will have some interesting personal opinions and experiences on in-person and digital communities. Please chime in with your thoughts!