Building Studios on Hyperlink - places for groups to learn and create together

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.

Here's a preview of an essay we wrote, Building Studios. It explains why we're making Studios, and how Spaces and Studios work together to form multi-layered environments for creative collaboration.

It also offers a vision for how individuals can weave together many groups, projects, and communities into their own personal learning ecosystems:

Building Studios

Hyperlink is building infrastructure for collaborative learning.

We started with Spaces — time-bounded containers for talking, working, and exploring things together online. Spaces represent the range of work we care about: creative projects, book clubs, workshops, study groups, and other experiments.

But there was something missing when it came to natural and nourishing ways to involve others in the activity we do in Spaces.

We know we're not alone in wishing for a special kind of internet campus — filled with diverse collaborative spaces and types of work; populated by peers with shared values and energy.

We want to share things we're proud of with friends. We want to work alongside peers who care about our work, people doing inspiring things we can learn from, potential collaborators. We realized that for Spaces to come alive, they should live within intimate, flexible, vibrant social contexts.

We're adding that missing piece with Studios — persistent environments for sharing and talking about constellations of projects with others. Studios form the second layer in Hyperlink's creative learning infrastructure.

…continue reading --> Building Studios

This is new and very WIP, but you can try the initial version of Studios now. Here's how it works, so far:

• log in or make a Hyperlink account
• create a Studio from the site header
• add Spaces for projects you're working on
• invite friends / collaborators to join
• post project updates, propose ideas, plan experiments, etc.
• you can even highlight a card from within a Space, to share it to a Studio (e.g. an artifact you want feedback on, or a comment on someone else's work)

Here's an example of our first Studio: Hyperlink Team

We'd love to hear what you think, and see what Studios you make. Suggestions welcome!

Over the coming months, we plan to explore Studios in more depth with a few focused contexts of use.

Async micro-conferences, meta book clubs, indie schools, project management for friends, residency programs, collaborative circles — we'll be digging into some of these soon, working with a small cohort of folks to experiment further and improve the app.

—The Hyperlink Team