#cat-roulette

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Looking to meet some cool CATs? You’ve come to the right place! Join us in #cat-roulette to be matched up with another random CAT member in the channel every 2 weeks—look out for a DM between you, the Donut app, and the fellow CAT you’ve been matched with!

What you make of your CAT roulette conversations is up to you! Feel free to use your matches to get to know a fellow technologist concerned about the climate crisis, share celebrations and/or commiserations in the fight, trade tips on how we might make an impact within our communities and workplaces using our skills and resources. Starting a project, a company or looking for a new position in climate tech? Share what you’re working on with your CAT roulette partners! Or go for a different approach and talk about anything but climate & tech. Make it your own and have fun. 💚

What do we do once we get a match?

👋 Set up a time and (virtual) place

Say hi to your CAT roulette partner, and set up a time and (virtual) place to meet! You can meet for 1hr for a deeper conversation or start with a 30min meeting and maybe schedule a second one if you want to talk more.

Some apps you may find useful:

  • When2meet A free scheduling app—useful for busy CATs with complicated schedules, and/or dealing with timezones and daylight saving headaches.

  • Zoom, Google Meet Free video conferencing apps (… on the off-chance anyone needs reminding). Generate a meeting link and attach it to your calendar invite for your chat!

In bygone times, one might have chosen to meet in person for such a match if you were located close to each other, but with current global health concerns and the distributed nature of the CAT community, it’s much safer and easier to just meet up online.

If you still choose to meet up in person anyway, please remember to take any and all precautions as you might when meeting up with strangers from the internet, e.g. wearing a mask, meeting in a public place, telling a friend where you’re going, etc. We trust that the vast majority of our CAT members are upright, sincere climate do-gooders, but it’s still always better to be safe than sorry!

💬 Chat on Slack

Generally we recommend a virtual face-to-face meeting but if finding a time to meet proves difficult, you can also get to know each other asynchronously over Slack.

Don’t know what to talk about? We’ve got some conversation starter ideas in our FAQ further down on the page.

After you connected

If you enjoyed your chat, please give your conversation partner a shout-out in #cat-roulette. You can @mention them, include a selfie if you met on Zoom or share a few words about what you learned or about the conversation you had.

If your match doesn’t reply to you

Sometimes CATs might be busy, so give your match a few days to respond. If they don’t get back to you within ~1 week, we have a self-regulating system so we can make #cat-roulette worthwhile for everyone. Please take these steps if your match doesn’t reply within ~1 week:

  1. Go to the #cat-roulette channel

  2. Path A:

    1. Click on the channel name in the top left

    2. Click on the ‘Members’ tab

    3. Search for the person who matched with you but didn’t reply

    4. Click ‘Remove’ (Nobody in the channel will see that you removed someone)

      Screenshot of the 'Channel details' view on Desktop (this is a pop-up window you get when you click on the channel name)

      Screenshot of the 'Channel details' view on Desktop (this is a pop-up window you get when you click on the channel name)

  3. Path B:

    1. Type /remove @MemberName into the message bar and hit enter (don’t worry, it won’t actually send this message to everyone — it’ll instead simply and silently remove the member)

  4. [Optional] Send this message in a DM:

    Hey!

    I removed you from the #cat-roulette channel as part of the self-regulating system we have for the channel. You can join back any time if you want to start being matched with other CAT members again.

  5. [Optional] Go back to the donut chat and click on the “✨ More options…” dropdown and select “♻️ I need a new match” to paired up with someone else. More information on this Donut help page

Code of conduct

A gentle reminder that, as always, all participants are bound by the CAT Code of Conduct. Please report any CoC violations to @Su on Slack.

FAQ

What if I want a different match?

If you’re in need of a different match, you can click on the “✨ More options…” dropdown and select “♻️ I need a new match” to paired up with someone else.

More information on this Donut help page

What should we talk about?

Donut has a few conversation starters integrated in the app (you’ll see those in the initial message from the Donut app). More info here.

Conversation starters

We also put together a few prompts to get you started if you’re unsure how to kick-off a good conversation:

  • Introduce yourselves (your name, pronouns, where you’re based & what you do)

  • Do you have anything interesting or meaningful on your desk or around you right now?

  • When did you join CAT and why?

  • What’s something you’ve dreamed of doing for a long time?

  • Is there an event you’re planning to attend any time soon?

  • What or who has inspired you recently?

  • What’s a film everyone should see?

  • What are you reading at the moment?

  • Who’s a living person you admire?

  • What’s one of your favourite smells?

  • What’s your favourite place in nature?

  • How do you recharge when you’re stressed out during the week?

  • How do you deal with climate anxiety?

  • What’s special about the place you grew up?

  • If you could live in a fictional world (any book or movie is fair game) just for this weekend, where would you go?

  • What did you think you would do for work when you were growing up?

Topic suggestions

If you want to focus your conversation on something specific, you can also suggest a topic for your chat. Here are some examples to inspire you:

  • How I take action

  • Climate justice and what it means to me

  • Food and agriculture

  • Why I care about climate

  • Climate careers

  • A climate concept I struggle with

  • My ideal future in 50 years

  • A topic I think isn’t discussed enough in CAT

I want to stop being matched with other CAT members

If you want to opt-out and stop being matched with other CAT members, you have a variety of options: you could snooze intros until a certain future date, opt-out of intros but stay in the channel, or leave the channel altogether. More on how to do all of these here.

I want to stop being matched with some specific people

Find yourself talking too much to the same people for some reason? You can add people to your “don’t pair me with…“ list, and get some fresh matches!

Summer refresh tasks (for #cat-roulette volunteers)

  • [DUE: Mid-July] Send a message into #cat-roulette telling people about the pause in August and the refresh in September

  • [DUE: Mid-July] Set up donut, so that it stops matches in August

  • [DUE: Mid / End August] Send a message into #cat-roulette explaining the fact that members will be removed and will have to rejoin manually in order to only have CATs back in the channel who are genuinely interested in chatting with their matches.

  • [DUE: End-August] Remove all members from the channel

  • [DUE: Beginning of Sept] Post in #1-announcements and the newsletter about the refreshed #cat-roulette channel (I can help with this)