We don't yet know exactly what social experiments look like, but from the first attempts of basecampers to launch some, we already know three of their most important features:

First, they all aim to create (or recover) something that's missing (or endangered) from our everyday social experience, e.g.:

• The aspects of ourselves that we are not expressing into society,
• The important, unsettling questions we're not asking,
• The uncomfortable conversations we're not having,
• The mixing of people that is not happening,
• The learning from one another that is not occurring, and/or
• The pathways of action we're not seeing.

Second, they all theorize an explicit connection between personal change and public change. Social experiments do not include, for example:

• "Self development" or "leadership development" purely for personal gain or for its own sake, nor
• "Solutioneering" - solving a quantifiable problem (say, food waste) in a way (say, a new app) that fails to grapple with the hard-to-quantify personal and social dimensions of the situation

Third, to be a social experiment, the actors, the actions, and the acted-upon must all be integral parts of it.