Hi all, quick update — the Hyperlink newsletter has been quiet, as we've been busy building Leaflet, our new app for collaborative document creation & publishing!

You can try it here, no signup needed: https://leaflet.pub

It's still early but Leaflet feels promising — fun and flexible, easier to use than Hyperlink, and in service of things we've long been exploring around collaborative creative work and learning.

Hello from Hyperlink!

We're making something new: a fun — and lightning fast! — app for making delightful documents.

It's called Leaflet. And it's coming soon!

Hello from Hyperlink!

We're looking closely at learning communities…in particular, thinking about how they can be better!

You may recall we recently ran some experiments with internet clubs. These were a lot of fun — but hard to be self-sustaining on their own. One reason for this is simple: clubs require activation energy that's a lot easier to harness in existing communal contexts.

Our current hypothesis is that Hyperlink is best, not for one-off projects and cohorts and gatherings, but as a community hub for persistent groups doing a range of different things together.

Hello from Hyperlink! Two new things for you this weekend:

First, a new post on the club-newsletter loop — an idea for how email newsletters can spin up groups to do interesting activity, write about it, and share back to their wider audience in a nice feedback loop.

We think Hyperlink can be a great place to organize pop-up gatherings and clubs, particularly for newsletters aligned around a community of practice.

If you write a newsletter (or know someone who does!) let us know if this sounds fun:

If you love creative side projects, working in public, or learning clubs (a la Hyperlink v1!) — we're trying some experiments you'll find interesting.

We're using new and improved Hyperlink Studios to play with internet clubs, where people each work on projects around a given theme, and the group shares regular updates by email.

We want to experiment with combining individual project workspaces with regular rhythms for sharing your work socially.

A quick update about Studios on Hyperlink!

We made Studios as a place for groups to organize and share many projects together — useful for things like clubs, cohorts, and gatherings.

The short story is: we've made a bunch of improvements to how they work, putting the focus more on the people and projects involved.

More detail here on what's new:

Hello & happy new year!

Wanted to share a new post we wrote — a vision, an exhortation — on "small-scale social" tools and networks on the internet:

• Things we value in cozy online social spaces, and want to bring to life
• Others in the small-scale socialverse, a burgeoning "shared society", and what we see as our role in it
• An emerging network topology, and how we might continue to create our own corners of the map :)

Check it out & let us know what you think!

Hi all,

Celine wrote an essay on our vision for designing software to help you do creative, collaborative projects — how and why we're working to make Hyperlink useful for projects that don't easily break down into simple lists of tasks, but are more like adventures, emergent and exploratory.

This piece touches on…

• the emergent process that unfolds in creative work
• designing an app that's like a flexible workbench
• creating space for slow meandering exploration

Hey! A few things for you from Hyperlink—

(…we say, pulling back the curtain as we make an app for learning and creative work, a collaborative enabling environment, an intimate playspace for projects, a friendly campus for cohorts…)

One, what's new in Hyperlink

We're seeing some very cool Spaces — visual storyboards, shared to do lists, collaborative workshops and more.

Hi all—

A couple months ago we announced that we were going deep on making hyperlink a great place to do projects together with close collaborators, and now we're releasing the output of that!

The big new features are:

• audio calls, to be able to communicate with your collaborators while in a space without juggling different windows and contexts
• realtime presence, so when you're in a space together you can see where people are and what they're doing
• and notifications, which if you enable, let you know when people are chatting with you inside a space!

Hi all—

We're exploring how to make Hyperlink great for small-scale creative collaboration — grab a friend and join us to play with projects!

To read online or share this post with a friend:

Hello!

We're launching a new part of Hyperlink we're calling Studios: internet homes for close-knit groups to learn and create together.

If Spaces are where we do projects, Studios are where we start, join, share, and talk about them with people who care.

Hello, friends of hyperlink.academy —

Big news: the new Hyperlink app is now in beta and you can try it today!

New Hyperlink TL;DR ✨

Hyperlink is a platform for creative work and learning — like a virtual campus or studio where you can make spaces to do meaningful things with small groups of friends and collaborators.

Hello from Hyperlink :)

If a reminder is helpful — we're building Hyperlink to make spaces for small groups to learn and create together. A place to make microworlds for book clubs, writing groups, collaborative projects…and play learning games of our own invention.

We've been busy working on the alpha of our new app, and have shared a few dev updates to our (as yet very small) alpha group, but want to give you the overview!

—=--˜¯--≈-—=-¯˜-≈--=≈--=—~>

Hi all, a quick update to share some Hyperlink news!

TL;DR: Hyperlink is evolving and we’re making something new — a social environment and set of tools, built around interlinked card-based activity spaces, for learning and creating.

We’d love to know if you’d like to play with an early version. If so, read on…

One more collaborative learning experiment to close out the year — let's get ready for Reading Week!

In college, "reading week" was built into the academic calendar: a period at the end of the semester, between the last day of classes and the start of finals, to spend studying and writing term papers.

Heading into the holidays, we thought: what if we could do something similar, and build some end-of-year focus time into our own calendars?

Hyperlink's Reading Week is one week long: Monday 12/6 – Sunday 12/12.

Next week, join us in the Challenge Garden! 🌱

Starting Monday, we're doing a week-long DIY creative challenge exercise, one of a couple small experiments we're running as we lay the groundwork for the next version of Hyperlink.

The Power of a Challenge

We're fans of the creative challenge format — typically a well-scoped, time-bound challenge based around a series of daily prompts or creative activity.

image credit: Harvard Map Collection

Last month we had ~25 conversations with members of the Hyperlink community, exploring a range of questions that are key to building the kind of product and learning space we envision. Questions like:

How do people manage contexts for creative work and learning?

What makes social interactions feel meaningful?

Let’s talk about our projects.

I don’t know about you but I have a whole pile — ranging from things I’ve been working on sporadically over the years, to things I’d love to make happen when I can wrangle the time / motivation, to constellations of ideas floating around, yet to crystallize.

Antilibraries book discovery newsletter. Hip-hop writing practice. Experimental event hosting (reading retreat? Micro-conference?) Getting back into photography. Making a website curating cool libraries. Poetry experiments. Creative constraints and Twitter games. Book clubs…

We're hosting two workshops next week, based on suggestions from our current Meta Course cohort.

One's about syllabus writing; the other is about designing more flexible and async-friendly learning experiences.

All are welcome to attend. Both events are free, just require RSVP.

Upcoming Events