Cohousing-L Mailing List: Meeting game idea

[Stuart Staniford-Chen (stanifor]

This worked well in one of our meetings tonight as a mood-clearing device 
between agenda items.  It took about 5 minutes with 8 - 10 people but 
might take a little longer with more people.

Stand in a circle about 2 arms lengths in diameter or a little less.  
Everybody close their eyes and count silently to ten for themselves.  
Each person then begin to raise their right hand.  Find a free hand of 
somebody else and clasp it.  Don't clasp one which is already clasped.  
Once your hand is clasped, start to raise your left hand and repeat the 
procedure.  When, and only when, both hands are clasped, you can open 
your eyes. 

Once everybody is holding two other hands and has their eyes open, the 
group tries to untangle itself as much as possible without unclasping any 
hands - everybody might be in one big circle, two circles, or whatever.  
It's pretty quick and good fun.

If the group was too big to stand in a small enough circle at the outset, 
try standing in a bigger circle and counting slowly to twenty and then 
shuffling forward into the middle with right hand outstretched.  (The 
idea of the count is to reduce the chance that everyone will just end up 
holding their neighbours' hands.)

Stuart.
N St Cohousing
stanifor [at] cs.ucdavis.edu
http://everest.cs.ucdavis.edu/~stanifor/cohousing.html