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.

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

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

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

"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

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…

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"

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…

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