The long-term mission of Austin Linkup is to gradually build the equivalent of a village or small town, with exactly the same social and personal continuity and close personal connections as an old-fashioned village or small town, but with all the advantages of urban life.

What is Austin Linkup? It's an actual community. It's home.

We want to make it as easy as possible for you to find people you'd like to become part of your life in a positive, meaningful way, and over the long term.

We want the process of adding new aspects to your life through Austin Linkup to be easy, creative, comfortable and fun.

We also very much want Austin Linkup to be a cooperative endeavor on every level:

- Hosts and guests cooperating to create wonderful events.

- Moderators of groups and members of groups both contributing to a positive, creative experience for the group.

- Members regularly contributing suggestions for improvement and enhancement of Austin Linkup, especially over the long term.

- Austin Linkup staff responding quickly, flexibly and with their own creativity to requests and recommendations from members.

We encourage the creative serendipity that is so often the origin of deeper change; your unexpectedly having a great conversation with someone you never even expected to meet is exactly what we want to happen. If you eventually become good friends with that person, we will be both happy and proud of any way we contributed to the process.

Eventually, we would like to build connections among several urban regions, both within and outside of the United States. We would like you to eventually be able to travel to many different cities, always with the confidence that you can immediately mix with the locals by attending events in that area, and possibly developing ongoing friendships with the people you meet, even outside of your immediate area.

We see Austin Linkup as the beginning of a large set of overlapping circles of friends, eventually spanning the globe, but always based on meeting in person, in a local setting.

Yes, there certainly is. Austin Linkup is a set of ideas, an approach to relationships, and an approach to life.

Aspects of this approach:

- Accountability in human relations is a good thing, whether you're at work or at play. People treat each other better when they hold themselves accountable. Accountability, much like integrity and commitment, provides crucial social stability and confidence in oneself and each other.

- Under common conditions, far more resources are actually available than appear to be available. Simply making obvious the resources that are available provides an enormous benefit. One of our main tasks at Austin Linkup is to make as clear as possible the human, social, emotional, and creative resources available within the membership.
It's all here for you. We want it all to be easy for you to find.

- Karma is not an abstract concept. Karma represents the the strict operation of social, emotional and spiritual forces in human relations. What you do comes back to you. Therefore Austin Linkup does all it can to promote positive cycles of interaction for members.

Even though Austin Linkup is not specifically for singles, you may find that Austin Linkup is actually more effective than many singles services. On Austin Linkup, you can meet lots of single people, but without all the nervous self-concsious burden of typical "singles events." Many events here are a much more comfortable, easy way of meeting singles than you'll find at singles services themselves.

If you meet someone you like, and want to know if they're single, there's an easy way to find out: just ask. In addition, if someone wants others to know they're single, they can turn on the little blue "s" in the profile to indicate this.

Yes. Austin Linkup is not intended to be an "online community." We think "online community" is a terrible contradiction in terms, which often leads to social isolation rather than genuine social interaction. Therefore, think of your computer as a personal tool that assists you in making genuine personal connections, in the real world, live and in person.

We encourage you as much as possible to get away from your computer, and get out into the real world to meet people, explore new possibilities, deepen your relationships, and create new possibilities for yourself and others.

Austin Linkup is also not intended to be big, or cold, or impersonal in any way. Isn't there far too much of all that in the world already?

Finally, Austin Linkup is definitely not intended to be technology that is simply created to sell and make a bundle. We are creating the software for Austin Linkup with the sole intention of helping people find what they want in life. We will never sell the technology to anyone.

We select our members carefully. Every application is reviewed by an actual human being, and we frequently include personal screenings by phone in the process as well. We very consciously look for people who are fun, interesting and have a strong social awareness. Yes, we deliberately choose "nice" over many other factors.

Our long term plan consists only of working with you to further build a wonderful community, and an enduring resource for you. We plan on continuing to develop this community for a long, long time.

Hosts told us again and again that they were tired of people sending in RSVPs and then canceling, often only a day or two before an event.

From the perspective of a host, it's very frustrating to go to all the effort of creating and organizing an event, get lots of RSVPs, and then see those RSVPs disappear as people casually change their plans. We wanted to create a way for hosts to gauge the reliability of those on the guest list, in order not to be taken by surprise.

Hosts can also set a threshold RSVP rating to determine who gets to RSVP for their event. We think it's only fair for hosts to have control over this aspect of their event. We also think it's only fair that those who are the most reliable in attending events be given an advantage in sending in an RSVP.

We also wanted to hold up a mirror to those who casually RSVP and then cancel just as casually. We'd like to remind those people of the effect of their actions on both hosts and other guests.

In any group of significant size, there are bound to be some people who just don't know how to get along very well. Since the primary purpose of Austin Linkup is to build positive social connections, the people who are disruptive just don't belong. It's as simple as that.

We respond promptly to any complaint about a member; we look into the issue, and then make the fairest decision we can. If there are repeated complaints about someone, we don't hesitate to remove them, and permanently block them from joining again.

That's simply what's best for the group.

We've had reports that some people love the response they get from customer service.

We've had reports that some people hate the response they get from customer service.

Funny thing about customer service--they're a mirror of how they themselves are treated. That's the way we want it, because the entire idea of Austin Linkup is to be a social system that responds on a human level.

The way customer service works on Austin Linkup is very simple, but may not be at all what you'd expect:

If you're thoughtful and polite, customer service responds in kind.

If you're less than thoughtful and polite, customer service quickly pushes back.

If someone behaves badly toward customer service, we reasonably assume that they would behave badly toward other people as well, and therefore probably would not be good for Austin Linkup. We have a policy of dealing decisively with people who are rude, belligerent or unreasonable.

After all, we want you to be thoughtful, kind and compassionate with other people, and to find out what you can create together. That's the whole idea.