And yes, after various communications, at least for now we’re moving our meeting location back to
85C Bakery Cafe. (for current meetings information, location, etc., see: Meetings).
Algorithm Coffee Co. was certainly worth the “experiment”, and certainly had a fair number of advantages,
there were a couple key issues that made it “not (yet?) good enough” to continue meeting there – at least presently, most notably:
- noise levels and acoustics – the place has little in the way of sound dampening materials/surfaces, fairly loud music, and patrons can be relatively loud to. Net effect, we had approximately 20% of or attendees find it intolerably loud – so loud they wouldn’t come back and/or it was headache inducing, etc. And I’d also guestimate about 1/3 or more found the noise level rather to quite annoying … e.g. I could converse with persons adjacent to me, one further away or across the table, with difficulty, but further away at same table – mostly couldn’t have a conversation – I couldn’t overtalk the noise for them to hear me, nor could I generally hear them over the noise.
- seating – seating was difficult/tight – though we did manage to get chairs have have most (about 90%) of us squeezed around one large table, there weren’t that many free chairs available, and a lot of the time folks were shuffling chairs about, or looking for chairs that might be available that could be relocated (e.g. most all the outdoor seating chairs got dragged in by patrons, so the would actually have a seat at a table).
So … back to 85C – at least for now. We’ll continue to look for better – several persons are working on it – feel free also to assist/volunteer/suggest – might be best to mostly do that on our List.