Get a group of friends together, each bring meaningful things to read, get cozy, spend lots of time reading & sharing!

Readtreat: one weekend, 8 people printed binders full of stories and essays to share drove from San Francisco to a cluster of cabins in Big Sur four activities: reading, talking, eating, and sleeping read in circles; once done with a piece all talk / respond can all read the same thing OR different things and talk about differences.

Party Where We Read Things: bring a piece of writing that inspired you, changed you, etc., ~1k words max be prepared to read it + talk briefly about why you chose it one night, 15 participants artifact: typeset and printed a book with everyone's submissions and introductions.

Generative collaborative sort of unconference; combinatory speculative research jam; wonderful creative collisions!

35 people; highly interdisciplinary / diverse (science, tech, math, art, design…)

90 minutes to make something strange, bold, and new then dinner + present the results (3 mins each)

Create work in any format; encourage depth over breadth; bold / experimental / exploratory

Gave a list of prompts (a bunch of great questions / sparks) ideas for future variations ("vantidisciplinariations")

A kind of micro-retreat / crit session—playtesting, going deep on design questions with a trusted group.

Goals: "go deep into the design of a specific part of each of our games, answer a specific design question, or solve a specific design problem".

4 days; 4 people each working on a game, already interesting and deep (or potential to be)

A retreat, with a nice house + catered meals

Four games = four slots, talk about each one each day, send questions / agenda ahead of time

All attendees must be capable of good discussion and acting on them (dev/design)

Notes via roundtable chat at the 2022 Interact Symposium

Circles program sits alongside other programs: main fellowship once a year; founder focus group + foundation course (liberal arts type thing, also 8 weeks); now exploring the residency - participants are mostly inside the fellowship but can bring outside people in to participate

Each has a "center" (organizer / facilitator) Very flexible theme etc. & centered around projects Attend weekly; fairly light architecture

Archetypes: personal interest, think through ideas in community, building product or program or org

Initially not one leader, very p2p…but realized over time having one point person ("center") as strong leader is needed

Should be: focused, collaborative, intentional…know what to do next, what you're working towards, collab work

Are concrete shareable artifacts key? Seems like it varies! Not necessary but useful, helps set the goals and do focused work, but some great ones without…somehow do have to present at the end

"Supercollaboration is an unusual but effective way of conducting research, where several people work together as peers to solve unsolved problems of common interest in a positive atmosphere, without worrying about authorship and setting aside ego…"

See also: Supercollaboration "how to"

Two core rules: 1) authorship on papers that result from supercollaboration is self-determined by each participant and generally in alphabetical order; 2) the unsolved problems and resulting discussion are confidential within the group, and can be shared with others only if the group agrees to it (or when the results get published)

Basic process: 1) assemble a group w/ common interests; 2) generate open problems; 3) encourage and moderate during sessions; 4) take notes and write papers upon success

In workshops (intense sessions) or weekly (e.g. in a class)

Unifying theme can't be too broad

Need common interests + also creativity and diversity

Open model vs. invitation model

Have done from ~3 to ~60-80 people

Designing open problems: easy to state (precise; single sentence), interesting and not too easy, not too hard, you have an idea or approach in mind, and not too much related work

During sessions, at least one person as driver (facilitating); maybe a scribe too

Start each session with a progress report

Two general formats: workshop - meet most of the day for multiple days (typically a week); weekly meetings over a semester or multiple years

A kind of exploratory art studio, basically!

Run by an 'Atelierista' with background in education + arts, who works with teachers and students, "facilitating learning experiences that compliment classroom curricular learning" and documenting this work

Cool examples e.g. Ray of Light Atelier; Digital Landscapes Atelier…

"Ateliers are environments promoting knowledge and creativity, suggesting questions and generating evocations; they are beauty that produces knowledge and vice-versa, the places where “the hundred languages” are enacted…"

Great post re: collaborative artifacts, from Matt Webb, specifically focused on ideas for zine-making!

WIP spreads etc., public view - lots of ideas!

Hypothetical vision…

Based on this real thing "Organizine"

"…what I’d like more of is the ability for those groups to produce something together. Barn raising. And the artefacts of those collective efforts… zines, videos, visual art, screenplays: things which are finished. Complete. Not posts in Facebook groups. Websites."

Writeup on peer groups for online courses, from Chris Wong:

"Like book clubs but for courses"

Find a group, go through a course together, regular check-ins, track notes etc. with notion + chat for async…

Other club-ish ideas: reading groups, creator circles, communities of practice, research groups, just for fun…

Any kind of decentralized book club with rotating facilitation!

Maggie Delano on syntopical reading in the Roam Book Club

Interesting approach to very structured group reading Syntopical = via "How to Read a Book", about examining the landscape of a field by comparing several books (just two here)

And with the purpose of synthesizing to answer your own questions 

Main critique: a) might work better with more canonically great books, and b) feels overly methodical; too much structure…