Prospecting for projects - tell us what you're working on!

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…

“Project-based learning” is a hot topic; we often see courses do a great job creating space and structure for participants to make a specific artifact. But we all have projects of our own, too, even if we have trouble conjuring the context to work on them consistently.

How can our own projects help us learn, and serve our long-term goals?

As we’ve been experimenting with Hyperspace, and thinking about how we can help people do meaningful learning and creative work together, we’ve found projects to be one of the most useful containers for framing how learning happens.

I find it hard to go from big goals and project ideas to consistent work and output, probably for a mix of reasons, from difficulty managing work and maintaining momentum, to lack of social accountability and positive feedback.

Similarly, there are various things that I’ve found helpful, from collaborative writing groups to self-imposed challenges. Our first Learning Adventure cohort earlier this year was a great experiment, a month-long peer support network for working on personal projects. What else can we try?

We’d like to run some experiments to further explore how ambitious self-driven learning projects work, and in particular, what social mechanisms can help.

To start, we’d love to know: what projects do you care about?

Interpret project in whatever way makes sense to you! A topic / reading list you want to dig into; a personal goal to write a book or make an album; a new skill to master; a thing you want to collaborate on with friends…

Depending on the responses we get here, we’ll see if we can try some things to help with pushing those projects forward. Details TBD but some ideas include:

• Matching people with similar interests / projects to chat
• Daily text message check-ins
• Sending a series of fun creative prompts
• Structured work sessions or show and tells

Hit reply and let us know what projects you’re excited about & open to sharing. Or other ideas for experiments to try!

Brendan